Expanding Understanding of and Access to Yorùbá Origin Ògbóni Esoteric Order Philosophy, Spirituality and Art

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju‏]

                                                                                      

                                                                    

                                                                         Expanding Understanding of and Access to 

                                                  Yorùbá Origin Ògbóni Esoteric Order Philosophy, Spirituality and Art

                                                                                                               

                                                                        

                                                                                                    

Ogboni edan sculpture holding an edan pair

The figure projects a sense of quiet majesty, expressing an inward identity. The regal bearing is paradoxically enhanced by the figure's freedom from clothing, a nakedness suggesting openness to the gaze of Earth, mother of all and centre of Ogboni veneration.

The genitalia is made prominent to symbolize the creative energy in the procreative capacity that perpetuates humanity, an aspect of ase, creative cosmic force permeating the cosmos as it emanates from Olodumare the ultimate creator.

                                                                                          Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                          Compcros

                                                                                       Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

                                                                       "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

                                                                                                                     

Abstract

A description of the philosophical, spiritual, artistic and historical significance of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order and why this value needs to be broadly projected so as to enrich the world on a global scale.

What is Ogboni? 

Ogboni is constituted by a number of esoteric orders, centred in social and spiritual secrecy, concealing the details of their activities as they engage with hidden spiritual knowledge. Ogboni is a nexus of Yoruba political, judicial, spiritual, philosophical and artistic history.

They were once one of the highest political and judicial authorities in Yorubaland, parallel with Obas.

                                                                                                                        

                                                                   

                                                                                                                Image Above

                                                  Edan ogboni, Ogboni sculpture representing the human couple as children of Ile, Earth

Fundamental Coordinates of Ògbóni Philosophy

Ogboni philosophy is one of the richest in history in terms of its underlying concepts.

It unifies the ultimate creator, Olodumare, with Earth, the most immediate reality enabling human existence in the material world and conjoins Olodumare and Earth with the human couple who ensure the perpetuation of the human species.

Ogboni philosophy thus centres Olodumare, the ultimate creator, transcendent and immanent, beyond the reachable yet present everywhere.

Ogboni philosophy unifies Olodumare with the material universe represented by Earth.

Earth itself integrates spirit and matter, through ase, a cosmic force emanating from Olodumare and permeating existence, enabling creativity and dynamism in all forms of being.

Olodumare and Earth are unified with the human couple.

The human couple dramatizes this unity of complementary opposites that defines Ogboni philosophy.

                                                                            

                                                                                                                       Image Above 

Ogboni sculpture depicting Onile, Owner of Earth and of the Ogboni iledi, Ogboni Sacred House of Congregation built on that Earth. She squats naked, her genitalia prominent in the traditional Yoruba posture of child birth, as she holds her breasts, firm and ripe, gazing ahead in a stance evocative of feminine erotic and procreative power and its spiritual associations, a complex at the core of Ogboni thought and art.

The Glory of Ogboni Metal Art

Ogboni metal art is magnificent, evoking the unity of the mysterious and the human, potently evoking feminine power and the glory of the human.

Current Problems in Understanding Ogboni

Yet, this great institution that helped sustain Yorubaland for centuries has fallen into disrepute with many in its country of origin, Nigeria, making the Ogboni name synonymous with the inhuman in the minds of many.

True, Ogboni is described as once engaging in human sacrifice as a judicial process, but I don't expect such practices to persist to the present day.

Whatever inadequacies are demonstrated in Ogboni history, Ogboni represents a philosophical, spiritual and artistic culture that can greatly enrich humanity.

This culture is significantly accessible, without joining any Ogboni fraternity.

This is so on account of the high quality scholarly publications on Ogboni.

These publications reflect only a small fraction of Ogboni thought and practice, but they are rich and suggest the scope of Ogboni knowledge, even though significant details, such as the details of Ogboni ritual, are not publicly known.

As a seeker of knowledge who has never been a member of Ogboni, I find this available information on Ogboni sublime and wish to share it with you.

I shall be presenting free online short explanations of Ogboni philosophy, spirituality and art.

I shall also be listing, summarizing and providing works on Ogboni.

I am doing this as a person who is not aspiring to join Ogboni nor trying to recruit members for Ogboni.

My goal is to demonstrate the glory of Ogboni philosophy, spirituality and art.

I also wish to show that this culture can be significantly studied, understood and practiced outside membership in Ogboni, like one can do with Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism, systems which I also study and practice.

In the process, I develop a new school of Ogboni, the Universal Ogboni Philosophy and Spirituality, one that is open while the other schools are secret.

This effort is one stage in my aspiration to unify African knowledge systems, facilitating their access through texts that guide study and practice.

Ogboni, as one of humanity’s great philosophical, spiritual and artistic achievements, must take its place on the world stage and this is my own contribution, sharing the inspiration I gain from this school of thought and practice.

                                                                                                                

                                            

                                                                                                                    Image Above

A man and a woman, children of Earth, kneeling in reverence to the great mother.

The woman holds her breasts, symbolizing maternal nurturing of humanity by Earth, nurturing capacity expressed in the human woman.

The man holds his hands in the Ogboni gesture of a finger held in the fist as one fist stands on the other, suggesting the Ogboni centring on quest for hidden knowledge, knowledge symbolized by the depths of Earth, richly nurturing yet far from human gaze, as the finger is concealed within the thumb.

Both figures are kneeling in reverence to Earth, she on whom we walk, whose air we breathe, whose water we drink and from whose body we eat, the mother of the human couple who make life possible, the mother of the family so generated across space and time, the mother whose power keeps us aloft within the cosmic void.

This image is an example of an edan ogboni, a central symbolic form of Ogboni. It is also used as a focus for a spiritual presence to guide the Ogboni initiate.

Image from the Femi Akinsanya Art Collection.

Invitation to Donate

You can contribute materially to this project, facilitating research and publication in this landmark in Ogboni Studies, the study of the ideas and practices of Ogboni.

Click here to donate at Ogboni Explorations blog.

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju‏]

                                                                                      

                                                                    

                                                                         Oracle Quest 1 

                                                     The Discovery of Oracle I 

   Bruce Onobrakpeya's Circle of Being and Becoming

                                                                                                               

                                                                                          Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                          Compcros

                                                                                       Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

                                                                       "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

                                                                                                                       Abstract

The time is a thousand years from now. The Oracle series of mixed media works by the 20th-21st century artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, first presented in the 2015 book Onobrakpeya: Masks of the Flaming Arrows, and adapting the visual structure of the opon ifa, a central symbolic and functional form of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge and divination, have long been missing,  rumoured to have been scattered to unknown locations across the world in order to prevent the arcane knowledge they embody being available to any one person,so dangerous these perceptions are whispered to be. 

Someone, however,  determines to track them down and unearth the mysterious cognition they enable. This series, combining art criticism, art theory and broader philosophical reflection within the compressed evocative and narrative power of the  short story and rich in detailed  visual and verbal engagements with each element in each of these works of art, represent this person's account of the quest. 

1."The Discovery of Oracle 1 : Bruce Onobrakpeya's Circle of Being and Becoming" 

Stumbling on Oracle I in a cave in India, the suggestive force of its balance of geometry and seemingly random assemblage in striking colour symmetries inspires  probing into the role of geometry in cosmological investigations in various thought systems, beginning from a comparison between the goals and methods of Ifa divination and cosmological physics, the latter represented by the theories of Albert Einstein on matter, energy, space and time.

 I eventually found, after much searching, the fabulous Oracle 1, created centuries ago by the great 20th-21st century artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, a structure believed to facilitate entry into the pivot of the cosmos, the locus at which the human mind converges with infinity.

The dust fell in light flakes on the cavern floor, its ancient rest disturbed by my entry into a place I had spent most of my life seeking. I carried the sacred object to a corner free from the dust descent and examined my find.

Oracle 1, 1993-2010, mixed media, 94 cm diameter, by Bruce Onobrakpeya. Courtesy of the Onobrakpeya Foundation.

This was indeed it, one of the last of the great constructs of a mind shaping skill now lost to the world. A magnificent adaptation of the circular symbolism of the opon ifa, a central functional and symbolic form of the Yoruba origin Ifa system. The artist had remade the inspirational construct in terms of an individualistic visual universe, creating a superb synergy of structural and colour symmetry through the correlation of three concentric circles, the deep blue of the central circle and the lighter colour of the surrounding circles reinforcing each other.

The colour depth of the innermost circle and the darkening, as if in shadow, of sections of the surface suggest a further visual range, a sense of plumbing in which colour gradations evoke spatial depth, spatial depth in turn suggesting cognitive depth, vistas of arcane knowledge represented by the playfully cryptic squiggles that cover the surface of the deepest circle.

The playfully mysterious squiggles of Oracle I, flanking the seemingly random sequence of stringed objects, the strings of probability

At the time of the ancient civilizations in which Onobrakpeya's creativity enabled this artefact, geometric forms had been central for millennia to efforts to visualize phenomena in terms of a unity. Can works such as this find lead us back to this fundamental knowledge?

Albert Einstein,"left to the world of physics a new viewpoint : the aim of the geometrisation of physics", I recalled from my reading of the essay on the 20th century scientist in the now battered but priceless volumes of the the 1971 Encyclopedia Britannica in our family library that had introduced me, as a teenager, to the world of deep scholarship.

The physicist searches for the most fundamental descriptions of the universe in terms of measurable quantities represented by matter and energy and the interactions between them. Einstein pursued the development of unified field theories, deriving the basic structures of nature represented by gravity and electromagnetism from the unity of time and space known as space-time.

The opon ifa artists and Ifa practitioners whose work Onobrakpeya adapts, also aspire, through their own distinctive methods, to understanding and working with the interrelationships of fundamental cosmic principles. Through the figure of Esu, an agent of Olodumare, the creator of the universe, a figure carved on the opon ifa, they evoke the integration and transcendence of opposites, time and space, good and evil. The face of this conjunctive figure looks down on the opon ifa from the top centre of the geometric structure of the divination tray, a face Onobrakpeya represents through the miniature form of a magnificent head of the kind that is one of the luminaries of art from the Yoruba city of Ife.

Face of Esu as Ife head

The face of the unifier of dimensions, who throws a stone today and hits a bird yesterday, so tall he cannot look into the cooking pot, lying down, his head hits the roof, as a rich oriki, a Yoruba praise poem, describes him, embodiment of the dynamism of being and becoming, majestic in the careful modelling of his idealized features, his head circled by royal beads convergent in the horizontal pyramid rising from his brow, presides over the the ensemble of multifarious forms embraced by the circumscription and concentration of space shaped by the concentric circles in Onobrakpeya's visualization.

Esu, as Ife head, presiding over the strings of probability, represented by the ostensibly random collection of forms that constitute the strings

Elegantly detailed, carefully wrought images line the circumference of the outermost circle, some of them human faces, others concrete, non-human forms, a procession of possibility in which the human person is involved as the most evidently sentient being on Earth, his self awareness expressed in the distinctive light of his eyes and the personality projected by his face, his creativity visible in the forms he constructs.

Elaborately incised circumference of Oracle I,top left side

Exquisitely carved circumference of Oracle I, right side

Streaming from beneath the Ife head occupying the traditional place of Esu in opon ifa iconography, is a collection of assorted materials, from cowries, to spark plugs and spirals, this ordered, yet seeming randomness being a transposition of the opele, the divining chain cast on the centre of the opon ifa to enable its configurations reveal the response of Ifa to the query addressed to the oracle.

The strings of probability, composed of an ostensibly random selection of things in the context of the spiral of being and becoming, the alinear strategy of wisdom seeking through Ifa's oracular wisdom, as inimitably evoked in Oracle I

In recognizing the ingenious character of Onobrakpeya's recreation of the opele, my mind goes to another effort, using other techniques, in exploring the convergence of different aspects of being, as the opele is employed in probing intersections between divine mind represented by Ifa and terrestrial circumstances.

Einstein is described as reconciling novel understanding of how movement takes place, the laws of motion, with new knowledge about energy, the laws of the electromagnetic field, in his 1905 Special Theory of Relativity, thus specifying " general conditions which theories must satisfy to be deemed laws of nature", as I recalled from the same essay on Einstein that had touched me so deeply.

Among the assortment resulting in the arcane beauty of the strings of small objects that hang downwards from the central figurine in the Onobrakpeya artefact are cowrie shells, a form of currency in classical African cultures, thereafter used as ritual forms. In this context, they may suggest commerce evocative of the transactions in Ifa divination between realms of being represented by aspects of the self, and between the self and possibilities beyond the self.

The cowrie of exchange, the currency at the great market of life, the means of transaction in interactions between forms and states of being

The inclusion of the spark plug in this assemblage is striking in being perhaps alone among the constituents of Oracle I in evidencing a technological leap beyond the achievement of the civilization that birthed the opon ifa, its parent form. This transgressive quality foregrounds the construct's projection of values that rise from a cultural matrix to transcend cultural particularity. The spark plug demonstrates the human being's harnessing of energy to power mechanical equipment, evoking human creativity and its expression of the "spark of existence", the creative vitality that makes possible existence and change within and across states of being, and expressed most dramatically in life and consciousness and their potential for enabling reconstructions of reality.

Spark plugs, the energy that enables Something in place of Nothing, the fire of life and recreation

This potency is mobilized, in this context, through the choice, shaping and organization of forms in creating what is in effect a portable shrine structure, a matrix for influencing the sensitive respondent to what the artist describes in the 2015 book Onobrakpeya : Masks of the Flaming Arrows, where this work may have first been pictured, as the "aesthetic charm, magic or manna that the combination of objects radiates", and, as he put it, inspiring entry into the wisdom and knowledge with which they are ingrained from the culture that created the opon ifa, its inspirational source, as this culture is re-imagined in terms of what was then modern art, thereby potentially catalyzing future artistic development.

Directly under the Ife head is a cowrie shell. Immediately below that is a figure that, with its bulging eyes and vertically compacted form looks like a version of an edan ogboni, the most visible symbol and magical form in scholarship of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order, an object reported by scholars to be very visible on most of Onobrakpeya’s Oracle series. The bulging eyes in classical Yoruba sculpture are described by a scholar whose name I don’t recall as evoking esoteric perception, vision beyond the scope of corporeal sight, while the rough compression of the figure is apt for the description of the edan as a vehicle of a spiritual entity, which though focused through the very limited dimensions of the figurine, is able to move across space, coming and going from its physical vehicle, in service to the interests of the Ogboni initiate to whom the edan has been consecrated, as described, among other sources, in Dennis Williams 1964 essay “The Iconology of the Yoruba "Edan Ogboni" .

Edan ogboni figurine? Bulbous eyes seeing into both matter and spirit, concentrated power suggested through crude compression of form

Spirals are also recognizable in these strings of diverse objects. The outward curve of a spiral from a centre in expanding loops may be seen as projecting relationships between stability and change, eternity and time, between the core of being in its unfathomable essence and the various transformations in terms of which it is expressed, most of these values made explicit in symbol systems cognate with Ifa, these being the Yoruba Ogboni institution, as described by Babatunde Lawal in his 1995 essay "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni" and in the related Nigerian Cross River Nsibidi symbolism, as depicted in the 2007 exhibition Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art.

The spiral of being and becoming

The struggle to understand the patterns that shape existence also emerges in Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, a " powerful guiding principle in our search for the laws of nature", one of its results being the equivalence of mass and energy, the disappearance of m units of mass leading to the liberation of mc² units of energy, c being the speed of light, the fastest speed in the universe, the speed at which the transformation occurs. In this way, masses of nuclei furnish the large amounts of energy supplied by nuclear reactions, the main energy source of stars, the words of that insightful essay on Einstein coming almost verbatim to memory.

The opon's surface in the Onobrakpeya transposition is covered with undecipherable scribbles, beautifully meaningless to most because unrelated to any known symbol system, yet lyrical in their visual dynamism, playfully random but evocative, in their opaqueness to meaning, of the oracular speech, the ese ifa, the opon ifa is a key agent in invoking. These semiotic sequences, scribbles and oracular verbalisations, demonstrate the tension between various zones of cognitive possibility, between what is within the scope of existing human knowledge, what is beyond the totality of human knowledge but is ultimately accessible to awareness and what is outside human knowing, and its accessibility to understanding by humanity remaining questionable.

Semiotic possibilities arising from a primeval unformedness. Is the cosmos aware of itself?

The cognitive courage of the human being, the drive to transcend our limitations through the quest for knowledge, emerges also in Einstein's 1907 -1915 General Theory of Relativity, in which the "laws of physics are the laws of geometry in four dimensions, and these laws in turn are determined by the distribution of matter and energy in the universe", that memorable essay sums up.

Continuities between primeval and present shapings of matter to tell stories for the human being?

The relatively uneven modelling of the inner circumference of the innermost circle in Oracle I, in harmony with the look of rugged stone created by the surface and colouring of the concentric circles, suggests an ancient artefact.

From Kenya's Olduvai gorge to the modern metropolis, the first humans and the latest humans, distanced by vast worlds of experience, but linked across time and space by the same quest to make meaning of the fortune of finding oneself alive on the third planet from a particular dwarf star

The forms inscribed on the outermost circumference, may thus suggest ancestors, not only in the sense of ancestors in the discipline of Ifa, as in classical opon ifa iconography, as described in Henry John Drewal at al's 1989 Yoruba : Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, but also in the spirit of the 2016 Panache Digital Games production, Ancestors : The Humankind Odyssey, depicting landmarks in humanity's struggle to shape its own history.

The circle of probability, humans and human created forms, enclosing the strings of probability, left side of Oracle I

Central to these achievements are cosmological conceptions, accounts of the properties of the cosmos in its broadest scope, such as Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, described as demonstrating the paradoxical possibility of a spatially finite though unbounded universe, as depicted by the essay that consistently counterpointed my encounter with Onobrakpeya's recreation of a cosmological structure from the different disciplinary context of Ifa.

The circle of probability, humans and human created forms, enclosing the strings of probability, right side of Oracle I

Onobrakpeya's Oracle I is a relatively small work, but it is great in its choice and combination of constituents, and the quality demonstrated by the crafting of those elements, an achievement that enables it encapsulate effortlessly a cosmological scope of associations, integrating beauty and power of construction and evocative force as a unified projection.

The artist describes this work as an "oracle" beceause it connotes "aesthetic charm, magic or manna that the combination of objects radiates". Central to this assemblage is the disparate collection of objects hanging as strings from the Ife head. The seeming irrationality, the inaccessible logic, of this collection is central to the work's combination of strangeness and beauty, the arcane and the conventional, the latter represented by the universal motif of the circle, the resulting ensemble rising, through this combination, to the level of the sublime.

What are the foundations of being and becoming?

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju‏]

 

                                                                                      

                                                                    

                                                        Oracle Quest 2 : lllumination in Darkness : Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracle II

                                                                                                         

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                             Compcros

                                                   Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems       

                                      "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

                                                                                                                       Abstract

The time is a thousand years from now. The Oracle series of mixed media works by the 20th-21st century artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, first presented in the 2015 book Onobrakpeya: Masks of the Flaming Arrows, and adapting the visual structure of the opon ifa, a central symbolic and functional form of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge and divination, have long been missing,  rumoured to have been scattered to unknown locations across the world in order to prevent the arcane knowledge they embody being available to any one person,so dangerous these perceptions are whispered to be. 

Someone, however,  determines to track them down and unearth the mysterious cognition they enable. This series, combining art criticism, art theory and broader philosophical reflection within the compressed evocative and narrative power of the  short story and rich in detailed  visual and verbal engagements with each element in each of these works of art, represent this person's account of the quest. 

2. "Illumination in Darkness : Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle II"

Acquiring Oracle II at great cost from a secretive art dealer in Berlin, the writer's captivation by its balance of mysterious power and explicit beauty leads him into the intricacies of the convergence of the arcane and the evident, the ineffable and the near to hand.

It had been a year since I discovered the construct Oracle I by the 20th/21st century artist Bruce Onobrakpeya in a cave at Anda, India, where it had been buried by the ancient sect who used it as an agent of cognitive expansion. The individual members of the master artist’s Oracle series had been scattered in the centuries after his time in the fear that the knowledge and power they embodied were not safe in the hands of any one person. I had devoted myself, however, to the quest for these momentous artefacts in the conviction that all understanding that may be gained by humanity enriches our grasp of the possibilities of being. Expending huge sums of money and great patience, I had at last obtained the second find in my effort to acquire the entire series, preparatory to distilling the insights they encode.

Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracle II

My latest acquisition, Oracle II, had come from a dealer in Berlin, who, realising its immense value and esoteric power as one of the lost keys of a timeless secret, had kept it hidden, accessible to only the most discerning collectors and most able buyers. Having reached this most solemnly delightful pinnacle of achievement in gaining ownership of this work, here I was, in my study at the Ogba Forest in Benin, a location the inspiring character of which is vital to the world of knowledge represented by the works of art I had dedicated my life to seeking, acquiring and studying. The strange and awesome atmosphere of the forest, its uncanny but profoundly uplifting sense of presence, attributed by those who live nearby to the goddess of the river that breaks ground in the vegetative space for the first time after a long underground journey, is an aspect of the magical and mysterious world that inspired the artist, an atmosphere uniquely conducive for the kind of sustained contemplation required to penetrate the marvellous artistic arcana by the ancient master.

Figure in darkness within circle

Oracle II constitutes a dialogue between the aesthetics of darkness and the symmetry of the circle, between eloquent concealment and evident order, between what is beyond complete cognitive circumscription and the symmetry of the evidently accessible, I concluded, marvelling at the compellingly uncanny form in darkness that broods over the structure, its visual force amplified by its positioning in a smaller ring within the larger circle that encapsulates the entire construct, the contours of the smaller disk, its spatial resonance, further highlighted by its location between a rectangle on either side, the emptiness of the framing rectangles projecting their role as purely delineators of spatial rhythms.

Figure in darkness within circle framed by flanking rectangles

My eyes are drawn by the organization of the work to the enigmatic form embraced by the circle at the top of the circumference of the larger circle. It inhabits a cocoon of darkness, a vertically flowing corridor composed by gracefully undulating ropes within which little light penetrates as glimmers of forms nestled within this space intensify the mystery of their character and roles. What is this uppermost form, occupying the space reserved for evocations of Esu, the Yoruba orisa or deity of paradox and transformation in opon ifa, the divination platform of the Yoruba origin Ifa system that is foundational for the Oracle series, yet does not resemble a conventional Esu image? Barely visible in the darkness of the space in which it is recessed, points of luminosity positioned vertically side by side within its body suggest eyes peering out of the crepuscular zone.

Central corridor with complementing vertically placed figures accentuated by various objects

Could it be an edan ogboni, a central symbolic and magical artefact of the Yoruba Ogboni esoteric order, as evoked by its similarity to edan sculpture in the suggestion of a large head dominating a highly compressed trunk, its mysterious presence within the alcove of darkness distilling the esoteric culture of Ogboni, the group’s most important ritual sculptures being hidden from sight as befits their numinous authority , as described by Morton Williams in his 1960 “The Yoruba Ogboni Cult in Oyo”, incubating their otherworldy essence through the generative potencies of darkness, as Susanne Wenger depicts of her adaptation of Yoruba shrine aesthetics in her 1983 book with Gert Chesi A Life With the Gods in their Yoruba Homeland?

Bottom figure of vertically placed figures in the central corridor

Resonating with the figure in shadow is another sculpture standing directly beneath it within the frame of the rope like substance that encapsulates the upper figurine. Through its sense of primal form, the lower statue intensifies the same quality in the upper figure, both projecting a sense of elemental power. Flanking the lower form are two edan, as two other edan are placed on either side of a row of three spark plugs in the lower middle of the assemblage, while below the spark plugs two elaborate and powerfully wrought figures are stationed, to either side of which are located another pair of figures, all these forms drawn from the aesthetic universe that defines classical African art and aesthetically proximate art forms such as those of classical Oceania.

Edan ogboni heads flanking the bottom figure in the central vertical sculptural alignment

Spark plugs flanked by edan ogboni heads

Sculptures underneath the spark plugs

One of the pair in the final, bottom set in the vertically organised sequence of sculptures

Multi-coloured, tightly woven threads, cowrie shells, a string like a necklace, complete the assemblage, multifarious possibilities chosen in terms of a seemingly asymmetric logic and enriching each other by contrast, complementary divergences amplified by their clustering within a carefully circumscribed space. Balancing luminosities of difference converge with spatial concentration in evoking a sense of grandeur, an opulence of actualisation suggestive of the opele, the divining strings of Ifa cast on the opon ifa to reveal oracular perception through their configurations, patterns understood as dramatizing the network of intersections in terms of which the dynamism of existence is constructed.

The opulence of the possible dramatised by the central assemblage

“ A great poetic image is more than the sum of its parts” the 20th century critic Dorothy Sayers declares in her introduction to the 14th century Inferno of Dante Alighieri. I could work at interpreting what I know of the symbolic significance of some of the forms that compose this powerfully lyrical work, as they are understood in the cultures that gave birth to them, and try to do something similar even for those forms unfamiliar to me, but having done that for the constituents of Oracle I, the first in the series of creations to which this piece belongs, I will not do so again, since some of these selections are included in the other work and particularly since the power of this construct transcends the particulars of its agglomeration of symbols.

Woven threads

What dominates for me with this creation is an aesthetic of harmony embracing an aesthetic of rupture. The magnificent symmetry of the circle, accentuated by varied, elegantly crafted miniatures that shape its circumference, each telling an intriguing, enigmatic story, is broken by the irruption of the figure in darkness dominating the top centre of the structure. This disruptive figure is, however, integrated into the absolute harmony represented by the rhythm of the circle, complexifying and further empowering the underlying aesthetic of rhythmic, soundless music, a seemingly discordant note absorbed into the dominant synchronization, deepening its resonance.

Staff of woven beads

This aesthetic of dialogue between harmony and rupture may be further appreciated in relation to various contexts in which similar effects occur. On account of the scope of these similarities, a few examples would be useful in suggesting the core of these possibilities. The darkness ensconced figure overlooking Oracle II reminds me of the mysteriously meaningful dark spaces of sacred tropical forests, alive with a compelling density of presence that cannot be accounted for wholly in terms of the outcome of biological qualities, a secret identity evoking a yearning to penetrate its core but the means of penetration through understanding of these forces being most elusive, or inaccessible, describing my own experience.

Woven threads

The sublime perfection of the circle that holds together the entire ensemble of Oracle II recalls for me the conception attributed to the 5th century Christian thinker St. Augustine, that “God is like a circle, with its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere”, an understanding of ultimate reality that tries to make sense of the absolute value represented by transcendence and immanence in terms the human mind can grasp.

Cowries

Conjoining these two impressions, I arrive at the idea of a darkness of unknowing at the heart of being, to adapt the title of the famous 14th century Christian mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing. This points to those aspects of existence that cannot be adequately analysed or grasped by the ratiocinative mind, from love to the sacred, evoking, referencing the 20th century Christian theologian Karl Rahner, as quoted in Paul Imhof and Hubert Biallowon’s edited 1986 Karl Rahner in Dialogue, “not the unfortunate remainder of what is not yet known”, but a core of possibility that embraces and transcends knowing as it is conventionally understood.

Necklace framing figurine at bottom of uppermost sculptural alignment

This paradoxical state is also embodied by the image of the Fulani cosmological personage Kaidara as described by the 20th century thinker Ahmadou Hampate Ba in Kaidara, a decrepit old man, dressed in lice infested rags, yet a beam of light from the burning core that is Gueno, the creator of the universe, an oxymoronic figure who embodies the intersection between the unknown scope of human knowledge and the range beyond which that knowledge cannot reach, similar to the comic figure of Olorun in some ese ifa, Ifa literature, yet, whose essence, in the words of Susanne Wenger in her review of Harold Coulander’s Tales of Yoruba Gods and Heroes, is hidden behind veils of taboo, a sentient darkness from which emanates Olorun’s character as “axiom paradoxon”, “beginning and consequence”.

Image Above:

A Procession of Storied Images.

Top right circumference : Last image in this detail :

The beak of a bird touches the centre of a ring of ripples on a pool over which it poised as a tree is starkly outlined in the background. Bird, water, concentric circles, here formed by ripples, and tree, are all universal symbols, with a broad range of symbolic values, some overlapping. “Having flown so long, I reached the ancient pool my beak touched its surface, sending ripples across the cosmos.”

The previous line in quotes is a construction of a story from the image, interpreting it as a visual parable of a mystical quest in which the bird is the human being and the pool the source of existence, an idea drawing from the symbolism of water in Japanese gardening as described in the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1971 essay on Japanese gardening, the mystical resonance of Japanese poet Matsuo Basho’s famous poem on a frog jumping into water and the Islamic mystical poet Farid ud Din Attar’s Parable of the Birds in which a group of birds go in search of an extraordinary bird, all these resonances mediated through the memory of English poet Gerald Manley Hopkins' celebration of the glory of the sight of birds in flight in his “As Kingfishers Catch Fire, dragonflies draw Flame” and “ The Windhover”, Basho and Hopkins being poéts who celebrated the unexpected emergence of the glory of existence in everyday happenings and scenes.

Second image :

Two birds perched on a tree. One eats of the sweet and bitter fruits of the tree, the other, eating of neither, simply observes”. Two aspects of the human self as depicted in the foundational classic of Indian philosophy and Hinduism, the Upanishads

__,_._,___

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju‏]

                       

                                                              

     

                                                                                                

                                                                     

                                                                                                Oracle Quest 3 

                                                                         Encounter in the Marketplace

                                                                       Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracle III

                                                                       

                                                                                          Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                          Compcros

                                                                                       Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

                                                                       "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

                                                                                                                       Abstract

The time is a thousand years from now. The Oracle series of mixed media works by the 20th-21st century artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, first presented in the 2015 book Onobrakpeya: Masks of the Flaming Arrows, and adapting the visual structure of the opon ifa, a central symbolic and functional form of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge and divination, have long been missing,  rumoured to have been scattered to unknown locations across the world in order to prevent the arcane knowledge they embody being available to any one person,so dangerous these perceptions are whispered to be. 

Someone, however,  determines to track them down and unearth the mysterious cognition they enable.. This series, combining art criticism, art theory and broader philosophical reflection within the compressed evocative and narrative power of the  short story and rich in detailed  visual and verbal engagements with each element in each of these works of art, represent this person's account of the quest. 

3. "Encounter in the Marketplace: Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle III"

Finding Oracle III in a market in Cairo, the writer is compelled to explore relationships between the artistic piece and the dynamism of the market, in the spirit of the classical African understanding of the world as a marketplace, adapting the title of Nkeonye Otakpor's 1996 essay on that conception in Igbo philosophy. 

 “Why is it beautiful?”, “What makes it beautiful?”, “What is the significance of this beauty?”

These are the core questions I ask myself when reflecting on forms I find beautiful. The compelling power of these enquiries, the exposure to the hidden places of the world, the insights into amazing dimensions of reality made possible by sensitivity to beauty, had inspired my quest for a series of artistic works, compelling in their recreation of aesthetic strategies already ancient in their time, and promising of entry into the unity of sense, thought and contemplation which I pursued as a template for opening the doors of the Ultimate.

Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle III

Standing in a market in Cairo, holding Bruce Onobrakpeya’s mixed media creation Oracle III in my hands, I reflected on these preoccupations. How fortunate the meanderings of fortune! I was taking a walk through the hubbub of activity that defined the zone of commerce, visually feasting on the vast assortment of goods on display, the energy of large numbers of people in action, when I spotted it. It was placed among prints of paintings of different kinds, but its authenticity drew my eye immediately. “Can this be an original Onobrakpeya?”, the rhythm of my heart beat out this question as I approached the stall where it was displayed.

Cascade of the multifarious

Yes. Unmistakable. The solid grooves of the varied forms carved into the circular circumference. The colour cornucopia of the central assemblage flowing from the head overlooking the middle of the structure. The playful, tantalizingly suggestive scribbles that marked the empty surface behind the strings of multifarious objects. Delightful harmonies of contrastive colours. This was indeed Onobrakpeya’s Oracle III, as evidenced from its picture in the 2015 book Onobrakpeya : The Masks of the Flaming Arrows, the first showing in pictures of what later became works missing to the world, their whereabouts unknown.

Procession of Sentinels, left side of circular circumference

The stall owner, seeing I was fascinated by the piece, encouraged me to buy it. We haggled. He had no idea of the true value of this superb creation, if not it would not be in his stall. Pretending not to be particularly motivated, I was able to get the work for what he believed was a fair price but which I knew was a ridiculously low cost, given its inestimable value. The assemblage safely in my hands, I asked where he got it from. It came to him among other works of art from a previously unknown person who brought them to his market stall for sale, he disclosed. How did this diamond come to be so concealed? An unseen hand using the nondescript as a means of hiding the magnificent?

Ring of Watchers, right side of circular circumference

The enormity of the achievement represented by my obtaining this artefact compelled me to take a seat in the market as the experience soaked in.

It was rumoured that the artist had invested his Oracle series with a potent portion of his own life force, a transformative energy channelled through the expression of his individuality in his organisation of disparate forms in constructing these artistic windows of possibility. Like the ritual master of the Yoruba Ogboni esoteric order, described, perhaps in Denis Williams’ 1964 “The Iconology of the Yoruba ‘Edan Ogboni’ ”, as channelling, through a nine day ritual, a disembodied sentient entity into an edan sculpture consecrated to a particular Ogboni initiate, this force thereafter acting as a means of protection and information gathering for the initiate as it came and went from its sculptural housing, the master of Agharha-Otor in what was then Nigeria’s Delta State, Ogboni edan being incidentally a recurrent feature of his Oracle sequence, is perceived as achieving, through these creations, a literal expression of what the 17th century English writer John Milton depicted in his Areopagitica as the quality of a good book being “the precious life blood of a master spirit [ sealed ] and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

First half of evocation of variety of being. Esu Laolu, at the crossroads of being and becoming, as an Ife head, looks down on the wealth of possibilities that constitute existence

Admiring the dance of colours from the spirals, cowries, gourds, spark plugs, edan ogboni, a Bambara chiwara sculpture, elegant in its dynamic poise akin to a crouching antelope, accentuated by a jagged spine in rhythm with alternating triangles of empty and solid space as the head flares upward like a point of flame, cylindrically woven beadwork, among other forms in the central assemblage, I can readily credit the care taken in creating, choosing and combining these disparate objects. This painstaking creativity is also evident in the forms inscribed on the circular circumference, each unique and detailed.

Chi wara of the Bambara, totem of creative activity at the nexus of sky and earth, as stretching from the beginning of human time

The artist does mention, in his introduction to the pictures of his artistic sequence, that “the name ‘oracle’ connotes aesthetic charm, magic or manna that the combination of objects radiates”. Intriguing, but what precisely does that mean? What exactly does he signify, in this context, by “magic” and by reference to the Biblical concept of “manna” or divine sustenance?

Second stage of projection of existence as seemingly random variety within concealed unity

To what degree should these ideas be understood in literal or metaphorical terms? Is he suggesting that aesthetic charm is synonymous with magic, with something beyond the confines of nature as conventionally understood, as Ulli Beier in his 1975 Return of the Gods : The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, may be seen as doing in referencing the thought of Wenger in its inspiration by Yoruba animism, describing aesthetic force in trees, for example, as an expression of consciousness and agency in these inanimate forms? Is Onobrakpeya alluding to a similar conception, a capacity understood in animistic cultures as pervasive across nature, as John Anenechukwu Umeh also depicts of Igbo thought in his 1997 After God is Dibia: Igbo Cosmology, Divination and Sacred Science in Nigeria? This body of ideas references a quality which may be described as mobilised by shrine art of Southern Nigeria in invoking non-material agency through aesthetic forms, as Margaret Thompson Drewal’s 1983 “An Ifa Diviner's Shrine in Ijebuland” depicts of the ritual strategies of a Yoruba Ifa adept and Norma Haas Rosen does in her 1989 “Chalk Iconography in Olokun Worship”, approaches resonant across the world as represented by Voodoo veves and Hindu yantras.

Culminating evocation of existence as a creative jumble, a complex network of symbolic intereferentiality, within which the human being seeks meaning

The procession of human and abstract forms, humanity and its creations, that shape the circumference of Oracle III resonate with the human beings and the goods they sell and purchase in the market where I have been arrested by this superb construct. This artistic constellation is evocative of the constellation of possibilities constituted by transactions in the theatre of life, an exchange of resources dramatizing the distinctive creativity each person brings to the business of living, an understanding of human life adapting conceptions from various African philosophies which see “the world as a marketplace”, quoting the title of Nkeonye Otakpor’s 1996 essay on that conception in classical Igbo philosophy.

Richly engraved humanoid, stylised and abstract figures watch over the unfolding tabeleau at the intersection of the art of life and the creativity of the artist

Like the market may be seen as microcosmic of human experience, Oracle III may connote human activity as an assemblage of possibilities, represented by the multifarious collection of objects that make up the strings in the centre of the form, within the ambit of the eternal suggested by the circle within which these disparate forms are organised. The spirals of transformation, spark plugs of creative drive, edan ogboni signifying the terrestrial foundations enabling life on earth, the dynamic stance of chiwara suggesting human creativity at the nexus of the elemental empowerments of sky and earth, the cowries of life as a transactional process, the leopards of beauty and power, the woven threads and beads signifying existence as a tapestry within which humans weave their own lives, all these subsumed, on the empty surface on which they rest, by the squibbles of inchoate speech groping after understanding, the hesitancy of a child’s growing understanding of verbalization or the helplessness of even a master poet like the 13th-14th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri in the face of the ineffable, in his Paradiso reduced to babbling “mama, papa” in accounting for his vision of the ultimate.

From emptiness, both primordial and immediate, rise inchoate gropings after existential and semiotic expressions at the borderline of what is not and what is, what may be expressed and what may not

Oracle III may thus assist us in appreciating what Onobrakpeya describes as the oracular nature of the series to which this work belongs as pointing to "the fact that the objects themselves are ingrained with wisdom and knowledge that our rich culture attaches to them". The “rich culture” in this instance is the understanding of opon ifa iconography as demonstrating a dialectic between emptiness and fullness, between the relatively empty centre on which odu ifa oracular patterns constellate in divination and the populated circumference, between the temporality suggested by the human and abstract forms that people the opon's circumference, and, adapting Ifalola Sanchez’s 2007 “ Discourse on Meaning and Symbology in the Ifa Divination System”, the circle of infinity that the circumference constitutes.

Rich engravings bring the circumference of the cosmic theatre alive, evoking unseen but vital forces that shape being and becoming

Feeling uplifted as I always do after experiencing a particularly satisfying conjunction of ideas, I rose from the bench and looked around me at the market crowd, purposeful in its diversity, each person pursuing their own goals within the network constituted by the matrix of their life, the totality of these overlapping networks shaping the complexity that is the human experience.

The human being reshapes the world, making the universe something it would not have been without homo sapiens, as suggested by these powerfully ingenious engravings near the bottom of Oracle III, evoking the master's painstaking, richly imaginative crafting of every detail, the artist justifying his existence by transforming the visible and invisible worlds into visible art, an interpretation of Onobrakpeya's artistic quest that adapts the Encyclopedia Britannica 1971 essay on the crowning vision of the 19th-20th century German poet Rainer Maria Rilke

Have I, by these insights, come closer to the rumoured secret, perhaps a gnosis believed to be enabled by Onobrakpeya's Oracles? One day, perhaps, glancing at the colour dynamism, the sculptural and object permutations of Oracle III, the doors of my mind could expand to experience, rather than simply think, the broad ranging constellations actualised by the artist, the circle of infinity grinding together the spirals of being and becoming in the fire of the mind.

Also published on Facebook

__,_._,___

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju‏]

 

                                                                                      

                                                                    

                                                                         Oracle Quest 4  

                                                         Suffusions of Colour : 

                                        Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracle IV

                                                                                                               

                                                                       Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                      Compcros

                                                         Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

                                     "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

                                                                                       Abstract

The time is a thousand years from now. The Oracle series of mixed media works by the 20th-21st century artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, first presented in the 2015 book Onobrakpeya: Masks of the Flaming Arrows, and adapting the visual structure of the opon ifa, a central symbolic and functional form of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge and divination, have long been missing,  rumoured to have been scattered to unknown locations across the world in order to prevent the arcane knowledge they embody being available to any one person,so dangerous these perceptions are whispered to be. 

Someone, however,  determines to track them down and unearth the mysterious cognition they enable.. This series, combining art criticism, art theory and broader philosophical reflection within the compressed evocative and narrative power of the  short story and rich in detailed  visual and verbal engagements with each element in each of these works of art, represent this person's account of the quest. 

4. " Suffusions of Colour: Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle IV"

"All men by nature desire to know.This is demonstrated, above all, in the delight we take in the sense of sight, for it reveals the differences between things", goes the first line of the Metaphysics by the 4th century Greek philosopher Aristotle. Can the multiplicity revealed by sight be traced to an underlying, unifying principle, he proceeds to ask, this inquiry forming the driving force of this book that institutionalized the philosophical field of metaphysics.

The encounter with Oracle IV in the possession of an Eskimo shaman who uses it for inter-dimensional voyages inspires the exploration of various forms of rationality in efforts to arrive at the foundations of existence.

A surface of concentric circles permeated by gradations of blue, light at the circumference, deep in the centre, amplified by roilings of white, blue and black like waves on a dramatically active sea, the central profusion of variously coloured objects framed and highlighted by the luminosity that shapes the circles.

Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle IV

The dramatic colour contrasts, the one distinctive quality of Oracle IV in Bruce Onabrakpeya’s Oracles series, lead me to wonder about the complexity and subtlety of the operations through which differences in colour are perceived by the human eye, making the world a much richer place than it would otherwise be.

This, in turn, takes my mind to the 4th century Greek philosopher Aristotle’s opening words in what, after his time, became known as his Metaphysics, in which he asserts, as a demonstration of the inherent human desire to gain knowledge, the delight in the sense of sight, in its enabling of the ability to distinguish between things.

Moving from this platform, he proceeds to enquire if an underlying principle can be found unifying this diversity.

He thus goes from sensory perception to ratiocinative examination of the implications of sensory phenomena, doing this purely through logical analysis, seeking, through reasoning alone, to arrive at a concept that would reveal how the variety of things that are perceptible by human beings may be organised in terms of a central principle.

What does existence rest on? The human bottom is designed for periodic rest, evoking the quest for the fundamental rest in ultimate reality, to adapt Catholic theologian Karl Rahner in Belief Today. Can the human mind ever have a final rest? The image above shows the bottom of Oracle IV, alive with a plethora of symbols vivified by eloquent colour.

The heat of thick clothes keeps me insulated from the terrible cold as I sit in respectful silence in front of Oracle IV, positioned on the wall of the igloo retreat of the Eskimo shaman, Warao. I was led here by a report that a structure akin to the Oracle series by the artist Bruce Onobrakpeya which I have been seeking for years had been seen in this place.

On arrival, Warao had informed me that he used it in facilitating shamanic journeying through contemplation of the work, leading to a perception of the universe as radiant with a rich blue welling from its depths, as against this background, an ordered chaos of many colours, seemingly glowing from all the forms in the universe, would rise in a symphony of meaning.

Image Above

"With our feet we walk the goat's earth. With our hands we touch God's sky", states a poem from the Kuba of Sudan in David Rubadiri's edited 1989 Growing Up with Poetry: An Anthology for Secondary Schools.

The sense of the sky as a dome enveloping the earth may be seen as paradigmatic for efforts to suggest the cosmic frame of terrestrial existence through the image of a circle encapsulating the totality of earthly phenomena.

What survives the eventual dissolution of material forms? The 18th-19th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant speaks, in his own way, for many thinkers in indicating the possibility of transcending his nature as an "animal creature, which after it has been for a short time provided with vital power, one knows not how, must again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it inhabits (a mere speck in the universe) [ through] a destination not restricted to conditions and limits of this life, but [reaches] into the infinite” in his Critique of Practical Reason.

The image above is the dome like circular top of Oracle IV, looking down on the wealth of diverse forms embraced by the circular enclosure that defines the space of the construct.

Was this truly possible? Who was I to say? A work of art, as all aesthetic forms, anything considered beautiful or harmonious, brings together various kinds of rationality. The visual perception of the beautiful represents one aspect of rationality. The effort to explore the meaning of that visual experience constitutes another character of rationality. The imaginative identification with the phenomenon involves another style of logic. The conviction that the referent enables mystical awareness of the kind described by Warao dramatizes yet another mode of the rational. These varied rationalities may all be coherent within their own frames of reference as held by various people and may even be sustained by the same person, as has been done by some thinkers and enthusiasts of the aesthetic.

Image Above

A half circle is a crescent. The crescent moon, the appearance of the moon as it moves towards and from its complete, circular image, visual changes existing only in the perception of the terrestrial satellite on account of its orbit round the earth, stimulates ideas of progressive unfolding of latent possibility, such as Mark Dyczkowski's 1992 interpretation of a line from a commentary on the 9th century Indian thinker Vasugupta's The Aphorisms of Siva, in which the waxing and waning of the moon represents the cycle of nourishment of the cosmos from an invisible "unchanging, underlying reality", an approach to the relationship between ultimate reality and the manifest cosmos in terms of the changes of perception enabled by the motions of celestial phenomena.

The image above is of the left side of Oracle IV, highlighting the balance between the richly carved circumference and the roiling blue, white and black of the empty centre of the concentric circles, a tumultuous emergence from a still centre.

“How did you get this work of art?”, I ask Warao. “It has been a family heirloom for generations”, he states. “It has been for me a means for finding direction at a critical point in my life”, he continues, “eventually leading to my becoming a shaman, a journeyer between dimensions”.

Amazing. Who would have thought Onobrakpeya’s creation would travel from Nigeria’s tropical, forested Niger Delta to the frozen North Pole, under circumstances it would be difficult to trace across centuries, becoming invaluable as a facilitator of a variant of traditional shamanic journeying?

Clearly, I would not be able to acquire Oracle IV as I had I-III, being too precious to Warao. I would have to be content with contemplating it in the hospitality offered me in his retreat.

Image Above

Enigmatic forms ring the right side circumference of Oracle IV.

Their contrast with and complementation of the empty centre boiling in a flux of colours suggest for me the cosmological constants, physical laws and their mathematical expressions, that emerged in the moments following what is understood by the dominant scientific theory on cosmogenesis as the explosion that created the universe, creating an ordered cosmos out of a prior condition which is so elusive of categorisation in terms of the knowledge built up from the study of the universe, the boundary of human knowledge that can be rationatively validated, this primordial condition is described as "Nothing", as summed up by Tian Yu Cao in his 2004 essay "Ontology and Scientific Explanation " in John Cornwell's edited Explanations: Styles of Explanation in Science.

The sentinel regularity and enigmatic stylisation of the circumference spanning forms also resonate for me with the related conception from the different cultural universe represented by Benin Olokun thought, which speaks of "the 401 deities who gave birth to me", the number 401 standing for infinity, as described by Norma Haas Rosen in her 1989 " Chalk Iconography in Olokun Worship".

The most comprehensive summation known to me of the scope of perception inspired by the senses is Babatunde Lawal’s 2001 outline of classical Yoruba epistemology in “Àwòrán: Representing the Self and Its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art”.

He describes this in terms of a movement from corporeal perception to, among other possibilities of knowledge and action, imagination, ratiocination, extrasensory perception and witchcraft, witchcraft being a practice that may be seen as the exercise of powers of action outside conventionally understood laws of nature.

This summation may be complemented by Anenechukwu Umeh’s depiction of the theory of perception of the Igbo Afa esoteric order in his 1998 After God is Dibia: Igbo Cosmology, Divination and Sacred Science in Nigeria ( 2 vols) , which, like the Yoruba conception, begins from a grounding in corporeal vision to embrace aspects of awareness beyond the corporeal, and, in the Afa case, culminates in the transcendence of the multiplicity of the material world represented by the plurality of human eyes, climaxing in cognition of the unity of existence.

In the centre hang fruits of various kinds, fruits of the tree of knowledge, fruits ingested with the eyes and digested through the mind.

Having experienced, over the years, all these stations of consciousness, adapting the terminology of cognitive mobility developed by the Islamic mystic Ibn Arabi, except that of the unity of being, although I might have touched its edges, its tentative unfolding before its suppression by my own diffidence, I have spent years trying to make sense of what were often puzzling and stupefying experiences. Here I was, far from home, engaging with something I was convinced held answers to the questions I sought, windows to understanding deeply yearned for.

The adept of Agbarha-Otor, like such masters of the transposition of classical African esoteric thought and practice who came after him to become his contemporaries, such as Victor Ekpuk and his transmutation of Nigerian Cross River Nsibidi and Owusu-Ankomah who created a cosmos out of the inspiration of Ghanaian Adinkra symbolism, has been able to achieve the recreation of the ancient symbols and ritual forms through his own individuality, while reworking their mythic essence, as Victor Ekpuk depicts his artistic vision in his 1995 Glendora Review magazine interview.

From the cave of becoming emerge forms multitudinous

Mythic indeed, one understanding of myth being ”the recreative, transformative power of the human mind expressed in varying degrees of intensity”, as described by Isidore Okpewho in his classic “What is Myth?”, later published in his 1983 Myth in Africa.

Okpewho further develops this perspective in describing a direction of post-classical African poetry in his 1989 “African Poetry: The Modern Writer and the Oral Tradition” as that of “transmuting the oral tradition into symbols so as to demonstrate its mythic essence”.

He thereby projects, incidentally, the conjunction of the primeval and yet timeless which the Niger Delta master has transformed into existence with the arcane assemblages that are his Oracle series, bringing alive in novel structures the ancient forces which classical African cultures had actualised in their sacred forms.

How did Onobrakpeya arrive at what forms to bring together to create the unique power of these works? How did he conceive what colour schemes to employ? Through what cognitive metamorphosis did he arrive at the creation of the intricate carving of the circumference, echoing, in its sense of granite engraving, the atavistic temporality of prehistoric art, the circling forms like sentinels at earliest creation, midwives at genesis?

Each face, each carved form, is a mirror in which self and Other intersect, a microcosm of the invitation to project oneself into the imaginative construct inspired by the artistic creation. What emerges from this conjunction between viewer and viewed is neither fully the outcome of the nature of the one who views or that which is viewed but a combination of both.

“Warao, how did this work come to have such meaning for you?”, I ask my host. The wind blows outside in its terrible power, but inside Warao’s house of ice, protected by its ingenious engineering, we are safe.

“Our family tradition has been that each person must work out its unique significance for themselves” , he begins. “It is a template for self discovery”, he states.

“The culture that inspired it, the purpose of its creator, are unknown to us, being from a distant social world on which, before you came to shed light on it, we had no information.

The construct, however, speaks in a language that touches us, the language of colour and of structure. The relationship between centre and circumference, between simplicity and complexity, individuality and collectivity, between a quality, such as light, and its gradations.

These are fundamentals projected by this creation from which one may spring into a universe of possibilities unique to each person, dramatizations of the language enabled by one’s own history”, Warao concludes.

Image Above

Brooding presences at cosmogenesis? The dialectic between abstract geometrization, realistic figuration and stylisation, as demonstrated in the carving of realistic and stylized forms into the circumference of the outermost circles in Onobrakpeya's Oracle series, has long emerged, in various cultures, as a strategy for indicating relationships between the material universe the human being readily perceives, represented by shapes that conform in a realistic manner, to this corporeal perception, and the non-material forms people can conceive, indicated by geometric and to a lesser degree, stylized forms.

The inter-cultural continuum between realism and abstraction reaches a summative climax in Hindu theory of the multidimensionality of cosmic identities or deities, in presenting them in terms of a movement from corporeality to abstraction dramatised by, in ascending order, anthropomorphic form, sonic form and geometric form, the full complement of which is actualised in the exemplary ritual the Sri Devi Khadgamala Stotram.

In presiding over the primordial generative flux that may be perceived in the empty centre of Oracle IV, the figures at the circumference of the circle that encompasses this creative matrix recall for me the 20th century Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo's invocation of the relationships between geometric forms and cosmological origins in his Labyrinths, in which the seeker journeys from the stream where the poet bathed as a child to the sources of cosmos, perceiving them in a manner that suggests they are either geometric forms or are reached through geometric configurations that frame their existence,“AND AT THE archway/ a triangular lintel / of solid alabaster/ enclosed in a square /inscribed in a circle / with a hollow centre/ above the archway / yawning shutterless / like celestial pincers like a vast countenance: ….. ‘after we had formed /then only the forms were formed /and all the forms were formed after our forming’ ”.

I could identify with Warao’s perspective. After all, was I not here on a similar quest? To seek assistance in making sense of the intersection between my individual universe and the larger cosmos with the help of a work of art, a symbol construct?

I sought help in unifying myself, in bringing my psyche and history together, as the Oracles integrate centre and circumference, multiplicity and the singular. Perhaps they could also take me beyond whatever synthesis is possible in the present into the empowered unravellings of the future.

What better way to pursue such a goal than through an enchanting symbolism, Onobrakpeya bringing this wisdom alive in his unique way, further providing a door to his decades long struggle, as evident from his creative history, with forms of the numinous as permeating all aspects of existence, from the ostensibly mundane to the expressly sacred?

All too soon, I had to leave after a week of enjoying the unparalleled hospitality of my host. I will return to this place, however, and the work of art that brought me here, again and again, through memory aided by pictures.

In the company of Oracle IV, I will seek ever deeper answers to the questions of who I am, where I am going and why I am here, on this planet circling a dwarf star.

Can a visual form facilitate the penetration of such mysteries?

From my experience with such forms, yes, particularly when, like Onobrakpeya’s Oracles, they are constructed with the purpose of eliciting such depths of cognitive journeying, even subconsciously, as the viewer is drawn in by the conjunction of colour and structure in the unity of symbols.

__,_._,___

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju‏]

 

                                                                                      

                                                                    

                                                                         Oracle Quest 5 

                                                 Paradoxical Aesthetics

                                 Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracle X

                                                                                                               

                                                                                          Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                          Compcros

                                                                                       Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

                                                                       "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

                                                                                                                       Abstract

The time is a thousand years from now. The Oracle series of mixed media works by the 20th-21st century artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, first presented in the 2015 book Onobrakpeya: Masks of the Flaming Arrows, and adapting the visual structure of the opon ifa, a central symbolic and functional form of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge and divination, have long been missing,  rumoured to have been scattered to unknown locations across the world in order to prevent the arcane knowledge they embody being available to any one person,so dangerous these perceptions are whispered to be. 

Someone, however,  determines to track them down and unearth the mysterious cognition they enable.. This series, combining art criticism, art theory and broader philosophical reflection within the compressed evocative and narrative power of the  short story and rich in detailed  visual and verbal engagements with each element in each of these works of art, represent this person's account of the quest. 

5. "Paradoxical Aesthetics : Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle X"

Oracle X, discovered by the writer in an asylum in Buenos Aires, where its previous owner had been confined because  the spell of the work had rendered her incapable of any other activity as she gazed continuously at the artistic piece gripped in her hand, inspires reflection on the tension between the human quest for ultimate, summative meaning and the possibly paralyzing paradoxes involved in this search.

The power emerging from oppositional elements, the beauty arising from the conjunction of contraries, the visual ontology at the intersection of the seemingly irrational assemblage of a person considered mad because of their life shaping immersion in extremes of the illogical and the esoteric logic of the classical African magician conjoining various diversities to create an uncanny construction.

Aristotle eventually conceded the ultimate impossibility of conceptually unifying all of being, I recall from an Encyclopaedia Britannica essay on the 4th century Greek master, a challenge perhaps pointed to by Bruce Onobrakpeya’s creative jumble occupying the central space in his engagement with the evocative force of the circle, his Oracles series. Since the cacophony that is existence is ultimately ununifiable, this style of thinking might hold, why not replace the quest for unity with the acknowledgement of the dominance of chaos, and celebrate disorder instead?

Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracle X, foregrounding seemingly chaotic order within exquisite structural and colour symmetries

My tracks and that of my ancestors before me stretching across the globe and back to the first people on the primordial mother continent, who initiated imaginative thought through their creation of exquisite shapes in densely dark caves and the crafting of tales that underlie all other stories we tell across all geographies millennia later, who first quantified time, making notations of lunar phases on a length of bone, tracks marked on the surface of the circle where we are trapped, as evoked by Oracle X, my latest find among Onobrakpeya’s Oracle sequence, tracks crisscrossing the space of existence in the doomed quest to arrive at the root of it all, torn between David Benatar’s conclusion in his 2008 Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence and the questionable comfort of the contradiction riven variety of ultimate answers, of a summative justification beyond our grasp, even as the farmer of time picks us off one by one, cleansing the earth periodically of all who walk it at any particular point in time.

All are active in perennially racing from one dreadfully serious thing to another even as the ultimate extinction looms in spite of its being pushed aside to allow for the frenetic busyness of the moment. All these frenziedly scurrying ants will be wiped out, their whereabouts unknown beyond the desiccation of earth.

Journeys across time and space figured by twisted streaks within the circle of being and becoming

Perhaps the resolution of our quest is to be found, not in thought or even intuition or revelation as some claim, but in something akin to the dimension bending scale represented by the pervasive presence of light, as suggested by the uniform luminosity of Oracle V in the orange washing across its surface as shown by its picture in the 2015 Onobrakpeya: Masks of the Flaming Arrows.

As the chaos of contraries represented by its central conglomeration is foregrounded, intruding itself into all efforts to arrive at ultimacy of meaning as suggested by the embracing completeness of its concentric circles, the race of light across the universe could be our chariot to the ultimate destination, taking our minds to where we could not go otherwise.

But even light is finite, however colossal its speed is to the minisculity of our passage through the medium and the littleness of our occupation of space.

Do we not gaze into time as we look into the night sky, the light from the stars only just reaching us having travelled for millennia?

In spite of the reflections of Einstein and others about transformations taking place when light speed is achieved, light might not be the answer.

Would faster than light motion, on the contrary, tear the universe or reveal dimensions beyond the trap we are locked into as creatures bound by the parameters defined by a scale of measurement in which light is a point of reference?

Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracle V

My quest to either assemble or engage with where I cannot obtain, the Oracle series of artistic creations by the enigmatic 20th century master, has again yielded unanticipated fruit in the acquisition of one these works, Oracle X, in most fortuitous circumstances, but this acceleration of fortune, rather than uplifting my spirits, has led me into despair, paradoxically, perhaps from the growing fulfilment of what I used to understood as my goal.

Am I not going round in circles, searching for some cryptic meaning in what are obviously beautiful constructions, but can they be more?

The interpretations I triumphantly develop about these works- are they more than circular actions in which the ruminations of the chewing animal are simply transformed into something no different in essence from what has been ingested?

Am I making any progress in breaking free of the circle constituted by the cage of human understanding, the walls that encapsulate logic of all kinds, no matter how ambitious?

In my current combination of despair and compulsion, the desperate hunger inspired by these creations persisting in inflaming me, am I slipping into a fate similar to that of the person who once owned Oracle X, having been consigned to an asylum in Buenos Aires from which I acquired it after her demise, the previous owner having been placed there after she proved unable to do without the work, gripping it day after day as she stared at it, doing nothing else and needing to be fed intravenously in order to keep her alive? Had she, like the figures in the Kabbalistic story, entered into the garden but could no longer come out?

Particularly mesmerising this construct really is, its rhythm of dominant white and blue harmonies in counterpoise with the dazzling variety of the colour contrasts foregrounded in its centre enchanting, the radiant white of the circling constellations embracing the enigmatic centre, the deep blue pool of circular space scoured by irregular troughs of jagged black as frenetic scribblings in spidery white lines claim the luminous turbulence, its superb clash of colours suffused by the richness of deep blue highlighted by the ordered cacophony of multifarious sculptural forms and other objects, each of them striking on its own terms, each distinct from the others and repeated in only about four or more cases out of that multitudinous assemblage.

The three major compositional units of Oracle X

One could spend a lifetime feasting on this visual music, fixated by the intersection of ordered and chaotic beauty, the steady luminosity of its radiant white and blue border in contrast with its turbulent blue, black and white centre thrown into relief by the grandeur of the assorted cluster whose logic defies the sequential procession that rims the circumference. Linear vs non-linear order, aesthetics of difference vs aesthetics of regularity.

Perhaps the earlier owner had been gripped, in this convergence of contrastives, by the perplexity that threatens me even now, trapped in the lake of brilliant blue the surface of which is roiled by irregular gashes of deep black and disturbed scribblings in white.

Could these paradoxical luminosities have actualised for her in a manner more forceful than any concepts the contradictions of any effort to pin down central questions that drive our existence, all answers to the deepest queries at last understood as at best provisional , the futility in trying to make sense of ultimate meaning by the human mind irresistibly compelled to fathom the rationale of being but the mind being so constructed that all efforts in this direction might be little better than lines of water skidding down a window, the interior beyond the window unpenetrated, yet the sheer grandeur of the cosmic drama, the glory of its absolute symmetry remaining inescapably compelling, a wonder focused in the mystery of the force of life animating body and mind, within the sublime construction of the human form and the grandeur of the human being’s shaping of existence from the crudity of the earliest days to the ascending magnificences of the unfolding centuries.

Perhaps these paradoxes, suggested by the glorious contrasts of Oracle X, arrested her, locking her within the tension between the marvellous and the perplexing, the potent and the destabilising, paralyzed at the intersection of the immersion in the glory of being and the impossible quest to grasp the totality.

Will that be my fate if I persist in this quest?

__,_._,___

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju‏]

 

                                                                                      

                                                                    

                                                                                     

                                                                     Oracle Quest 7 

                                                                          Taking Stock

               

                                                                                        

                                 

                                                                                        Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                          Compcros

                                                                                       Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

                                                                       "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

                                                                                                                       Abstract

The time is a thousand years from now. The Oracle series of mixed media works by the 20th-21st century artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, first presented in the 2015 book Onobrakpeya: Masks of the Flaming Arrows, and adapting the visual structure of the opon ifa, a central symbolic and functional form of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge and divination, have long been missing,  rumoured to have been scattered to unknown locations across the world in order to prevent the arcane knowledge they embody being available to any one person,so dangerous these perceptions are whispered to be. 

Someone, however,  determines to track them down and unearth the mysterious cognition they enable.. This series, combining art criticism, art theory and broader philosophical reflection within the compressed evocative and narrative power of the  short story and rich in detailed  visual and verbal engagements with each element in each of these works of art, represent this person's account of the quest. 

  7. Oracle Quest 7 : Taking Stock

Questions on the logic of the quest.

Having come this far in my quest, I have decided to take stock. I am deeply gratified to observe the sublime achievement represented by Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracles in their exquisite transposition of opon ifa visual forms and symbolism as well other artefacts from within and beyond the Yoruba culture from which the opon ifa was born. The artist has contributed magnificently to the already grand tradition of opon ifa stylistic genius and symbolic scope.

Where do I go from here? Do I consider myself fulfilled in my pursuit at this point or persist in my search until I have discovered all the Oracles, the six I have encountered so far and the remaining thirteen? Can I sustain the rigour, the physical, mental and economic challenges of the journey, spanning various parts of the globe and several realms of knowledge?

To what degree do I really have a choice in this? My whole life has become concentrated into the narrow but profound intensity of meaning dramatized by Onobrakpeya’s Oracles, becoming a matrix around which all other affairs in my life have organised themselves.

Without this quest, in its combination of physical dynamism and reflective challenge, my existence would be disembowelled of its core of meaning.

The 20th century’s greatest mountaineer, Reinhold Messner, organised his epochal exertions as activities beyond the physical act of climbing mountains, being more acts of communion enabled by the intersection of the human being and colossal natural forms which dwarf all efforts by humans to take their measure.

Along similar lines, Onobrakpeya’s Oracles transcend all efforts to engage with them at whatever breadth and depth of dedication and knowledge. They are a distillation of his decades of experimentation with classical Nigerian shrine aesthetics, dramatizing his distinctive projection of the arcane and enigmatic within the rigorous discipline of opon ifa structure.

Combined with my elation at these great works, the sense of drinking in something wonderful, is the experience of melancholy at the distance between the perfection of these creations and the rupture represented by my life, the often perplexing distance between ideal and actuality, pieces of possibility which I am able to integrate with each other only slowly and painfully, in the spirit of patching a broken pot, a task often carried out in the semi-darkness of limited understanding, groping forward by faith, intuition and scraps of knowledge.

Is it not in recognition of the fact that human beings are largely operating in ignorance of the fullest scope of possibilities in relating to the context of their lives that systems like Ifa, particularly in its divinatory aspect, are developed to address such cognitive gaps?

Is this divinatory approach a demonstration of knowledge external to the self or emerging from within the self or a combination of both?

Can I use the aesthetic frames of Ifa, from its visual to its verbal forms, from opon ifa to ese ifa, Ifa literature, as a means of adapting such cognitive strategies and thereby gaining further light in navigating this semi- darkness in which I live?

Can Onobrakpeya’s achievement take me further on this road? Could the unique beauty of his Oracles, their melding of colour and shape, their agglomeration of diverse symbols, enable a sensate and ideational configuration facilitating a panoramic perception of my life within the ambit of the comprehensive circumscription of his oracular circles and potent squares?

In responding to this question, I have developed an Onobrakpeya Oracles Yantra, shown above, adapting the Hindu visual symbolism of the yantra, a geometric form used in representing abstract, cosmological ideas.

A diagram like this, in which four of the Oracles are linked by being located on points on a circle across the various sides of the geometric structure, imply the creation of a cosmos, a visual universe potentially evocative of existence as a whole through its deployment of the suggestive force of the totalistic circumscription of the circle.

This metaphoric breadth is focused through the specificity of a particular set of visual forms, Onobrakpeya’s Oracles. A particular selection from the comprehensive associations of the circle is thus developed. This selection may be adapted in terms of the circle’s cosmological potential, building the associative value of the circle through a mutually reinforcing range of universalistic and particularistic associations.

I have come a long way from the time of my birth to communicate with you in your own language, a language I am prepared to learn by listening to you with the ears of my eyes.

It has been a long journey. Attentive to you, I understand the journey from where you are to where you point to will be longer still.

What is this place where the road leads? It is difficult to know for sure although various views are advanced as to its nature. From time to time, however, the cloud covering the destination thins a little and certain outlines can be discerned, outlines unique to each seeker but universal in their suggestion of the integration of the struggles of a lifetime, struggles encapsulating, in a manner unique to each person, the significance of the journey of the human race and its non-human affiliates from the beginning of their coming into being into the unforeseeable future, struggles suggested by the embrace of multiplicity of forms by the geometric perfection of the Oracles.

Also published on Facebook

__,_._,___

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju‏]

 

                                                                                      

                                                                    

                                          Oracle Quest 8 

                       Integrating Divergences

         Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracle XII

                                          Central Panel

                                                   

                                                                                                               

                                                                                          Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                          Compcros

                                                                                       Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

                                                                       "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

                                                                                                                       Abstract

The time is a thousand years from now. The Oracle series of mixed media works by the 20th-21st century artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, first presented in the 2015 book Onobrakpeya: Masks of the Flaming Arrows, and adapting the visual structure of the opon ifa, a central symbolic and functional form of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge and divination, have long been missing,  rumoured to have been scattered to unknown locations across the world in order to prevent the arcane knowledge they embody being available to any one person,so dangerous these perceptions are whispered to be. 

Someone, however,  determines to track them down and unearth the mysterious cognition they enable.. This series, combining art criticism, art theory and broader philosophical reflection within the compressed evocative and narrative power of the  short story and rich in detailed  visual and verbal engagements with each element in each of these works of art, represent this person's account of the quest. 

8. Oracle Quest 8 : Integrating Divergences:Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracle XII, Central Panel

Divergences and complementarities of meaning between the circle and the square.

                                                                                                  

                                                     

The central panel of Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracle XII

A face gazed at me, its serene beauty mirrored by the symmetry of the circle within which it was positioned. The Yoruba orisa or deity Esu, in the form of an imitation of an exquisite head from the Yoruba city of Ife, had been displaced from his conventional place at the top of Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracle constructs and at the apex of the opon ifa, the symbolic and functional form of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge which inspired the Oracles, to the centre of a circle at the lower section of a rectangle.

The relocation of the circle from its previous role in other Oracle creations as subsuming the entire construct, to the lower centre of the flat space, reducing its size, foregrounds its structural perfection by focusing the eye of the viewer on a tightly circumscribed space.

This visual focus is amplified by the centrality of the circle within the larger expanse constituted by the rectangle, a centrality highlighted by the culmination in the circle’s centre of a cascade of multi-coloured cylindrical woven threads and an intricate vertical design.

This visual centrality is further enhanced by the assortment of objects in the centre of the circle, the circle’s lyric symmetry emphasized by the procession of abstract and figurative figures that define its circumference.

The central panel of Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracle XII

Esu’s location at the centre of the circle invites reflection on implications of Esu as orisa of intersections, crossroads of possibility bringing together various practices, conceptions and disciplines, diverse forms of being and modes of knowledge, as these correlations are embraced within an integrative constellation suggested by the circle.

This is part of the working hypothesis of Okechukwu Nwandiani in his investigations into the relationship between Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracle XII and the prehistoric Ikom monoliths in what used to be Nigeria’s Cross River State.

He is convinced that Onobrakpeya’s Oracle series represent a visual transposition of the intersection between the Nsibidi symbol system of the Cross River region and the Ifa tradition, a conjunction represented by the Ikom monoliths, themselves a variant of Nsibidi, their embodiment of a conjunction between Nsibidi and Ifa demonstrated by the designs inscribed on them and their spatial configurations.

We are at Nwandiani ’s office at Akwashi University, examining the central panel of what, from its picture in the 2015 book Onobrakpeya : Masks of the Flaming Arrows, was originally a panel of three separate constructs collectively named Oracle XII, the central panel being a gift to the university from an anonymous donor.

We discuss his theories. “I am convinced I am on the edge of a massive cognitive breakthrough”, he enthuses. “Onobrakpeya’s Oracles constitute a language of their own, a language constructed of relationships between shape and colour.

This language is another version of his self-created Ibiebe script. Like Nsibidi that exists in the multiple forms of the symbolism of human physical action, script, abstract and figurative and quasi-figurative shapes, verbal expression and object arrangement, Onobrakpeya’s visual language is multivalent, both scriptic and visual, colour and object based”, he declares.

“How does this relate to the Ikom monoliths?”, I ask. “Clues in the Oracles, as evident from pictures of them, from this example in my office, the central panel of Oracle XII, from the inscriptions on the monoliths and their spatial organisation suggest a relationship”, he states.

“I think the circular organisation of the monoliths on some sites relate to astronomical configurations, corresponding to the circles in Onobrakpeya’s Oracles and circular constructions in opon ifa.

The face of Esu looking out of the centre of the circle in Oracle XII may dramatize the capacity of human consciousness to integrate various bodies of knowledge within a cosmological framework evoked by astronomical patterns, these patterns represented on the circumference of the Oracles' circles by elegant figurative and abstract designs”, he concludes.

Most fascinating. I don’t understand the details of why he has made these links between Onobrakpeya’s Oracles and the Ikom monoliths but the ingenuity and scope of Nwandiani’s ideas are intriguing.

I turn my attention back to the striking beauty of Oracle XII. The multi-coloured woven threads hanging from top to bottom enliven the space with startling colour in the midst of the orange that suffuses the surface of the structure, the central white textile weave bifurcating dramatically to frame the objects underneath it as its colour contrasts sharply with the multiple luminosities of the textile elongations on either side of the white bifurcation.

Cowries and various metallic and other objects, at the centre of which is the Ife head, shape the nucleus of the circle as two slender, delicately inscribed vertical panels frame the entire construct.

Nwandiani’s theory makes sense, in a speculative spirit. The placid expression of the Ife head that stands for Esu within the perfection of the circle could evoke a contemplative equanimity from within which the self tries to integrate its cognitive scope and the unknown into a totality akin to the Zulu conception of ultimate knowledge represented by the circularity of the calabash, evoking the integration of past, present and future, the particular and the universal, life and death, space, time and eternity into a cohesive whole, as described by Mazisi Kunene in Anthem of the Decades. A great vision to which people have aspired to in various ways across time and space. Is it possible of fulfillment? What validity is demonstrated by claims of its accomplishment?

When we are able to develop an equation that unifies all the laws that describe the character of the cosmos we shall then know the mind of God, the physicist Stephen Hawkins states in A Brief History of Time.

If God exists, could the mind of such an ultimate referent be circumscribed by the character of the physical cosmos and the means through which this character is described by human beings, however far reaching human insight into this cosmic configuration?

An intelligence so far above human consciousness that we are only able to grasp it in terms of the crude forms represented by its dimmest expressions which are the best our most exalted perceptions are able to reach, another physicist, Albert Einstein, describes his conception of God.

Through their senses human beings experience the outward surfaces of things, and even through their minds, are unaware of the inward substances of phenomena, much less the substance of God who can be known only through the perfection of the laws that regulate the cosmos, Isaac Newton, another physicist, declares in his Principia Mathematica.

These perspectives from some of the deepest thinkers across centuries of the discipline suggest the scope of efforts to integrate the aspiration to a comprehensive understanding of the cosmos with the quantitative systems through which this goal is pursued in physics.

Later that day, I take a walk amongst a circle of Ikom monoliths. Their silent eloquence, expressed by their forms and organisation, as they stand rooted in earth but point to the sky, lend themselves to associations with a conception of order unifying the celestial and terrestrial worlds.

The association with Oracle XII is not difficult to reach, the circular structure of the organisation of the monoliths, the circle of opon ifa iconography and the circle at the visual centre of Oracle XII which the opon ifa circle inspires, are identical geometric forms in various media, created to suggest an idea of perfection, a conception through which the human mind represents both its sensitivity to its own potential as capable of conceiving and aspiring to perfection and the relationship of this aspiration to the world beyond the self.

The Esu evoking Ife head at the centre of the circle of Oracle XII suggests humanity, the head being the physical centre of the kind of consciousness that defines the human being, as embodying the ability to integrate contraries in order to perceive their unity, a capacity vital for grasping whatever meaning is accessible in the often puzzling but glorious multifariousness of the universe.

Also published on Facebook.

__,_._,___

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju‏]

 

                                                                                      

                                                                    

                                                                         Oracle Quest 6 

                                    Penetrating the Depths of Time 

                                 Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracle XVII

                                                                                                               

                                                                                          Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                          Compcros

                                                                                       Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

                                                                       "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

                                                                                                                       Abstract

The time is a thousand years from now. The Oracle series of mixed media works by the 20th-21st century artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, first presented in the 2015 book Onobrakpeya: Masks of the Flaming Arrows, and adapting the visual structure of the opon ifa, a central symbolic and functional form of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge and divination, have long been missing,  rumoured to have been scattered to unknown locations across the world in order to prevent the arcane knowledge they embody being available to any one person,so dangerous these perceptions are whispered to be. 

Someone, however,  determines to track them down and unearth the mysterious cognition they enable.. This series, combining art criticism, art theory and broader philosophical reflection within the compressed evocative and narrative power of the  short story and rich in detailed  visual and verbal engagements with each element in each of these works of art, represent this person's account of the quest. 

  6. Oracle Quest 6 : Penetrating the Depths of Time : Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracle XVII 

Reflection on perception and communication at an archaeological excavation in Iran.

The lift moved swiftly into the depths of the earth, having been constructed to enable entry into and exit from the various zones reached in the extensive archaeological excavation in the Iranian city of Sari a friend on the exploratory team had called my attention to.

A find at the deepest level reached so far reminded him of my long search for a series of works by the adept of Agbarha-Otor, the town in Nigeria where the artist Bruce Onobrakpeya had been born and with which he remained associated for most of his life.

Reaching our destination, we entered a chamber carved into the earth, on its upper surface an inscription in Mazanderani, a language of the region, translated by my friend as “On Earth we live, to Earth we return”, the motto of a group dedicated to the earth, who had created this cavern deep within the soil in recognition of their devotion.

Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle XVII

My friend pointed me to a square hanging on the back wall, surrounded by letters he rendered as stating “World to Market, Market to Earth”, indicating another conception of the fellowship, a description of the world as a marketplace of commerce in possibilities of existence, the fecundity and stability of earth enabling the continuation and dynamism of all terrestrial species, an idea embodied in a mythic matriarch residing in the earth, under a market, at the centre of the space formed by four calabashes, each bearing an element evocative of a central aspect of human life- charcoal powder for humanity’s use of energy sources across time, from the most elementary to the most sophisticated, mud, indicating the meeting of earth and water in representing the two major forms of terrestrial matter, white chalk dust, its motes suggesting the luminosity of consciousness as it aggregates through sentient beings populating the earth, red camwood dust, blood and the fire of life.

Beautiful configurations

Weighted by the gravitas of these ideas, deeply intrigued by their concentration of complexity in simplicity of images, I focused attention on the square framed by the inscriptions communicating those ideas. This was clearly Oracle XVII, as I confirmed from scholarship on the artefacts represented by Onobrakpeya’s series. A dance of lines dominates the background. The vertical inscriptions of odu ifa, the semiotic patterns of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge, traditionally inscribed on the opon ifa, the divination platform which inspired Onobrakpeya’s Oracle creations, were thereby transposed into an almost musical rendition, their melodious beauty more an outcome of spontaneous rhythm than a deliberative structural harmony. The two hundred and fifty-six permutations of the possibilities of existence represented by the odu ifa are thus dissolved into their dynamic essences, as it were, evoking their dramatizations of the rhythm of being and becoming, of change within stability.

As I face Oracle XVII, I see myself sitting on the point of intersection of the various conjunctions in time and space that constitute my present, my past and my future, the threads underlying these transformations represented by the elegant intertwinings of Oracle XVII.

Lyricisms of time

“What am I doing with my life?” I am compelled to ask myself as I view these delicate configurations in terms of my existential matrix. The pulse of life, steadiness of mind and vigour of body convince me I am still very much in the struggle, but like the octopus scheming its way out of confinement, its large many tentacled form squirming free in arcane genius, I need to strategize in order to reach a position of maximum opportunity.

Oracle XVII transcends my efforts to give account of it. I gaze and gaze at it, held by the balance between the absolute simplicity of its surface and the wealth of diverse forms hanging in front of that surface of swimming lines. I have assimilated the symbolic significance of a significant number of these objects, have reflected on the implications of their clustering, and have given account of these in my writings on the Oracle forms I have encountered so far, but the compulsion of the work remains inexhaustible, its unique beauty beyond the grip of verbal equivalents of its visual cues and their enigmatic power, a transcending force that is the unique prerogative of aesthetic forms, of the beautiful in nature and human creation, regardless of the character of that beauty.

Response by Eze Chimalio to the Facebook posting-

"This like the other writings on Studying Bruce Onobrakpeya is definitely turning into to a companion and essentail guide to the art of the man. Sublime and evocative. For 'Penetrating the Depths of Time : Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracle XVII' Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju puts on a vibrant coat of arms that meanders across a personal story that has a centre-point that is refelctive of Oracle XVII.

It is important to note that the writer is in awe of the object's intrinsic and elusive magic and in some way fails to find words to express the deepest meanings he has found within it.

But, that in itself does not distract from the message he receives and perceives from it. Here, transcendence takes a more human form that is normal, healthy and cultured."

Eze Chimalio This like the other writings on Studying Bruce Onobrakpeya is defintiely turning into to a companion and essentail guide to the art of the man. Sublime and evocative. For 'Penetrating the Depths of Time : Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Oracle XVII' Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju puts on a vibrant coat of arms that meanders across a personal story that has a centre-point that is refelctive of Oracle XVII. It is important to note that the writer is in awe of the object's intrinsic and elusive magic and in some way fails to find words to express the deepeest meanings he has found within it. But, that in tiself does not distract from the message he recieves and perceives from it. Here, transcendence takes a more human form that is normal, healthy and cultured.

__,_._,___

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju‏]

                                                                              

                                                     

     

                        “Ayajo Asuwada” 

         The Great Poetic Prayer  

                                 from the

Yoruba Origin Ifa System of Knowledge

                                                                        

                               

                                               

                              Asuwa, the principle of unity dramatized in "Ayajo Asuwada" in action in an ant colony                

               

                                                                                  Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                   Compcros

                                                                   Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

                                                   "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

  The poetic prayer “Ayajo Asuwada” from the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge is magnificent for its scope of ideas and the weaving of those ideas into a seamless musical flow represented by a broad variety of characters, from divine creators to natural terrestrial phenomena, from the hairs on a human head to the growth of grass to fish in the ocean, all subsumed by the image of dew falling from the sky, a thread running through a universe of possibilities, a universe dramatized by the poem and reflecting the cosmos, as the cosmos is encapsulated by Earth.

Even though the poem is centred on developments on Earth, the correlation of those occurrences with cosmogonic progression-cosmic origination and development- makes it easy to imagine the poem’s central principle of “asuwa”, which may be translated as “togetherness,” in terms of the developments of cosmos.

I first came across “Ayajo Asuwada” through a selection from it in Babatunde Lawal’s The Gelede Spectacle.The beauty of his translation inspired me to seek out Lawal’s source for the poem, leading me to Akinsola Akiwowo’s “Contributions To the Sociology of Knowledge From an African Oral Poetry,” International Sociology 1986; 1: 343 and the storm of responses inspired by the paper in relation to other publications by Akiwowo, a range of reactions that can easily be observed by searching “Akinsola Akiwowo” in Google and such search systems as Google Scholar and archives like Semantic Scholar and academia.edu.

These reactions are centred on Akiwowo’s project of indegenising sociology, if I get the term right. I understand this as involving developing sociological theory from ideas within the ideas developed within the cognitive history, the quest for knowledge within particular societies and efforts to understand societies in terms of how they see themselves, if I have understood Akiwowo’s project adequately.

My interest here is in Ayajo Asuwada as a prayer, an appeal to cosmic powers to bestow the blessing of togetherness evident in various forms of well being on oneself.

The beauty of the prayer transcends any doctrinal affiliation and anyone who chooses to use it may fruitfully situate any terms they wish for those in the prayer they do not wish to use.

I break the prayer into units that might not reflect Akiwowo’s paragraphing method but which help distinguish various thematic clusters.

I begin with Lawal’s translation that inspired my interest in the poem.

Ayajo Asuwada Selection by Babatunde Lawal

“Dews pour lightly,pour lightly,

Dews pour heavily,pour heavily,

Dews pour heavily,

So that you may pour lightly.

Thus Ifa [divination] was consulted for Olofin Otete

Who would pour myriads of existence upon the earth.

......

One particle of dust became

A basketful measure of dust

.....

Olofin Otete it was who carried a basketful of dust to the earth

Olofin Otete used a basketful of dust

To create the land at Ife.

Myriads of goodness took the shape of togetherness.

Strands of hair came together to occupy the head.

....

The clumping of trees became the forest,

The clumping of eruwa grasses became the savannah

...

Bees always cluster together

Eeran leaves grow in a bunch.

The broom exists as a bundle.

...

The creator of togetherness, I invoke you

Let myriads of togetherness come to me.”

Translated by Babatunde Lawal from Akinsola Akiwowo “Contributions To the Sociology of Knowledge From an African Oral Poetry” in Babatunde Lawal, The Gelede Spectacle : Art,Gender and Social Harmony in an African Culture. Seattle : University of Washington Press,1996.21.

The complete poem as presented by Akiwowo:

Teeming heads congregate at the grove of Ogun.

The anthill is the morere of the eerun.

Asuwa is the morere of humankind.

It was with the principle of asuwa that the Heavens were established.

It was with the principle of asuwa that the Earth was created.

In asuwa forms all things descended upon the Earth activated by purpose.

Complete and actuated for a purpose was iwa at its first emanations.

It was by asuwa that Ori was formed in order to be the Father of all.

Perfect, complete, and actuated for a purpose was iwa at first emanations.

For a set purpose was iwa when it poured down upon Earth.

Origun was the source of Oluiwaaye

While Baba-asemuegun-sunwon was the emanate of Oluiwaaye

Olofin Otete was the emanate of Baba-asemuegun-sunwon

Olofin Otete it was who used a basketful measure of dust particles to create the Earth

Olofin Otete it was who proscribed the cultivation of igbikugbin

In this Father’s soil.

Igbinkugbin is death.

Igbinkugbin is loss.

Igbinkugbin is ewe-ina.

Igbinkugbin is yeesi.

Igbinkugbin is anragba leaf.

Igbinkugbin is Yemoro.

Olofin Otete carried the basket of soil particles

And created ile ife (terra firma).

All goodness together formed an asuwa.

When the assembly of hairs was complete,

They took over the head.

When the assembly of hairs on the beard was complete,

They became ojontagiri.

When the clumping of trees was complete,

They became forests.

When the eruwa grasses were completely assembled,

They became savannah.

The agbon, when they assembled completely,

They uphold the roofing of a house.

When the ita assembled completely,

They covered the face of the Earth.

Girigiri is never absent

In the habitat of the aladi.

Girigiri is never absent

In the agiriyan of the eerun.

Alasuwada I invoke you

To send iwa-susu down

To bear to me all ire gbogbo (common good)

Origun, begot Baba Asemuegun-sunwon,

Olu-iwaaye begat Baba Asemuegun-sunwon,

Baba Asemuegun-sunwon begat Olofin Otete.

Otete, you are Alasuwada.

Asuwa:

Asuwa:

Permit all gbogbo ire compressed together to issue forth toward me.

Asuwa:

Asuwa:

Asuwa is what the oyin are.

Asuwa is what the ado bees are.

The eeran leaves grow in asuwa.

Asuwa is what broomsticks form;

It is in asuwa that the eeran leaves grow in the aare.

Asuwa is what the elegiri birds form;

It is the coming together of a multitude of men

That we know as warfare.

It is as asuwa that one encounters the grassland,

It is as asuwa that locusts invade a farmland.

Alasuwada, it is You I call

To send all goodness to me:

All forms of aisuwa, depart from me:

It is from Alasuwada that I emanate.

I am he who is begotten of Alasuwada.

In countless number, the yindinyin throngs their habitats;

In countless number, swarms the Yaya in the hills,

In several asuwa the termites colonise their mounds,

In several asuwa we encounter the ekunkun by the riverside.

It is as asuwa that we find the labelabe by the waterside.

It is as asuwa that we meet the oore in the swamp.

It is as asuwa that we behold the lamilami.

The leaf called adosusu is never found singly.

In asuwa - far as the eyes behold -

We encounter the Erimi tree.

In asuwa, we encounter the egbele fish at sea.

In asuwa - far as the eyes behold -

We encounter the crustaceans in the ocean.

In asuwa - far as the eyes can see -

We meet the eegun: Akaranba is the cognomen of eegun;

Which, when they feed in a school

All other fishes follow in their trail.

Origun Olu-iwa-aye.

Help me to achieve my goal.

Ela: you are the offspring of Alasuwada!

There is no Alasuwada like Origun!

Origun, you are Alasuwada! their trail.

The sediments of last year are found in the river.

Performing their sacrificial rites in the undergrowths.

Ela wooro-wayi!

Origun: come forth and collect sus-iwa-da for me.

Ela wooro-wayi!

You are the Alasuwada!

Dews pour lightly, pour lightly,

Dews pour heavily, pour heavily,

Dews pour heavily so that you may pour lightly.’

Thus Ifa was consulted for Olofin Otete.

Who would pour myriads of existences down upon the Earth

On the day he was to receive the ado of existence

From the hands of Olodumare;

On the day, he was to release

Existences on the Earth.

One particle of dust became

A basketful measure of dust.

A basketful measure of soil became the earthcrust.

Dews pouring lightly, pouring lightly

Were used in moulding our earthly home;

Dews pouring hearily, pouring heavily

Were used to mould the Earth.

So that ire-gbogbo may multiply upon it.

Ire-gbogbo took the shape of asuwa.

There is no luckless head in a companion of travellers.

For ire-gbogbo is in form of asuwa.

Yankangil 0 alone it was

Who strayed for a moment from his companion,

Was said to have stolen iru to eat

From Mother Olugamo’s tray in Heaven.

Asuwa!

Asuwa!

Iiree mi.

Asuwa!

There is no luckless head in the domains of Ife.

It is not-being-in-tune-with-other-heads that is the problem.

Ire-gbogbo is in the form of asuwa.

Yet it is from the only-and-only-one Origun in Orun

That each earthly Ori branches,

Ire-gbogbo is in the form of asuwa.

If one ori improves

Its improvement will affect two hundred others.

1. Asekun-suwada nigba Iwa se.

2. Asuwa la fi da Ori tu se Baba won nigba Iwa se.

3. Origun, Asekun-suwada nigba Iwa gun.

4. Asuwada nigba ti Iwa ro.

From Akinsola A. Akiwowo “Contributions To the Sociology of Knowledge From an African Oral Poetry” International Sociology 1986; 1; 343-48.

Also published on Facebook.

                                                                   

__,_._,___

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju‏]

                                                                              

                                                     

     

Stylistic and Thematic Rhythm

in the

Work of Abiola Irele

                                                                                        

               

                                                                                  Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                   Compcros

                                                                   Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

                                                   "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

Abstract
This essay develops an approach to understanding the cosmos through imagination and reason across literature, philosophy and music in the work of Abiola Irele, a philosopher, critic and theorist of literature, music and culture whose writing is remarkable for its elegance, profundity and range.

Abiola Irele’s “What is Negritude?” is a magnificent survey of the central ideas of an ambitious and conceptually and imaginatively luminous philosophy.

His ‘The African Scholar” is a pioneering summation of systems theory in terms of convergences between contemporary science and mythology in terms of the Yoruba deity Eshu.

His “The African Imagination” grapples with what may be understood as the shaping matrices of imaginative expression emerging from Africa.

His “The Criticism of Modern African Literature” is a superb statement on the nature and study of literature in general and African literature in particular, while his essays on music project an immersion in consonances between Western classical music and African popular music.

How may such strategic theoretical and critical orientations by a penetrating explorer of African expressive forms and cognitions be correlated to give a unified picture of the cosmos approached from within these varied forms as studied by a person whose thought is both grand and incisive but who did not publish any effort to unify his various zones of interest?

Can such a unification be mapped through his exposition of Negritude, a philosophy that engages imagination and rhythm as primary principles for exploring being in general?

How robustly, however, does Negritude relate with reason and science, two central thrusts of Irele’s work, even though his examination of science occurs in only one essay known to me, ‘The African Scholar’, though a trenchant examination that situates that engagement solidly in his thematic orientations?

To what degree was Irele an expositor of Negritude and to what degree was he a Negritude thinker, a person who tried to understand reality in terms of Negritudist ideas?

Irele’s thought, spanning classical and post-classical African thought and expression, across various disciplines, looking into the past, present and the future, provides templates for mapping the creativity of the continent and the transformations associated with it.

An effort to unify the cognitive streams underlying his varied engagements will act like a lighthouse illuminating a vast terrain within and beyond the continental and transcontinental penetration of African creativities.

Stylistic and Thematic Rhythm

Stylistic and thematic rhythm unifies Irele’s work. Stylistic rhythm is demonstrated in his exquisite weaving of ideas and expressive structures. Each sentence, each paragraph, is akin to a musical sequence, in which words are chosen with the exactitude of the most painstaking sonic art and arranged in strings of sensitivity to both precision and evocative force.

Abiola Irele and the Art of the Essay

The elegance of his writing emerges in his unique demonstration of the architectonics of the essay, his writing demonstrating the correlation of a style of thinking with a style of writing,
ideas and their mode of expression operating as one integrative unit,. Ideational processes are realised through linguistic expressions that do not simply express the ideas but dramatize the character of those ideas. He favours complex sentences where a number of subtle ideas are intertwined like powerful snakes, projecting conceptions which resonate in one’s mind, at least in mine, for years to come.

The validity of his constructions, the magic of his style and the unique nature of his humanistic genius adapting John Burnaby on St. Augustine of Hippo, emerge in his best work, in which the sentence, as a building block of the essay, achieves a communication of ideas that is both luminously logical and beautiful.

This effect is realised in terms of diction and the balance of ideas, the words in terms of which ideas are expressed and the relationship between these words within the rhythm of syntactic structure. The entire essay itself becomes a cathedral of ideas, composed of numerous, intricately interlinked concepts, yet suggesting depths of possibility of which the
superstructure realized by the expressed ideations are but the exposure to light of a complex foundation which may yield to careful study.

His magnificent sentence structures are particularly evident in The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, most of the essays in that work being great, timeless pieces. "What is Negritude?", for example, exists in a unique universe in the expression of ideas. I have read some great essayists, but I wonder if I have read anybody who is Irele's equal, in terms of learning and architectonic power, in which each sentence is a carefully crafted diamond building up to a wonderful totality.

A quintessential Irele paragraph, in the range of knowledge it is resting on, its evocation of vast possibilities, while remaining a precise expression of a specific idea or ideas, constitutes a research project. The kind of scholarship that will do justice to Irele's work needs to address each sentence, at times each word, each phrase, with the level of attention one gives to similar units of expression in poetry and religious literature, while examining the total form represented by the essay and its inspiring context.

One expression that always comes to my mind is the expression "articulated resonance", his description of the role of the literary critic in "The Criticism of Modern African Literature" in The African Experience in Literature and Ideology.

Whenever I recall that expression, I start laughing, and at times, sighing. I laugh because its like encountering something precious in the middle of the road, that road being the stream of the day and of one's thoughts, this form that one suddenly encounters being so wonderfully articulated and polished, one has to wonder, what kind of knowledge could have created something like this?

The expression implies a pyramid of knowledge of which that expression is the apex, an iceberg of which it is the tip, while the complex conjunctions of ideas that enable the expression are buried within its terse form.

In "Wangrin:A Study in Ambiguity" an introduction to Amadou Hampate Ba's The Strange Destiny of Wangrin,Irele makes the following assertion about Kaidara,another work by Ba:

"....it represents a transposition into an individual idiom of the original poem, which comes to bear the stamp of an individual sensibility, manifested in a personal relation to the universe of ideas and values of which the text is an expression in the original language of its composition".

What strikes me about this expression?

His efforts to situate his concerns as a literary scholar within the broader canvass of the development and application of knowledge, particularly as this applies to the African condition within the continent and the Diaspora.

The quote could be described as centred in the subject of the transposition of discourse from one frame of conception and expression to another. Within this matrix, the operative or central ideas that emerge consist in a negotiation between polarities. These polarities are represented by the notion of an original or source discourse, an individual rather than a purely literal response to this source form and the target form into which the source form is being transposed.

Poetry is the specific discursive form that acts as the vehicle in the Wagrin quote but the quote suggests the relationship of this literary form to broader universes of discourse in Irele’s highlighting of "...the universe of ideas and values of which the text is an expression..."

Another reference that relates this evaluation of a poetic work to questions of the transposition of discursive forms in general is the focus on language. Language as the encoding of the originary source of discourse and language as the framework of the target form to which the originating source is being transposed.

How can the translator, the transmitter, communicate as effectively as possible the discursive forms they are transposing? Is it through an effort at a literal reproduction? How possible is such literality, particularly when dealing with language, and with orally encoded rather than written discourse?

The difficulties involved here inspires Irele's focus on an "individual idiom" bearing "the stamp of an individual sensibility" indicating "a personal relation" to the discursive universe of the text.

The focus, therefore, is not on an effort at literal transmission but on an imaginative, if rigorous transposition. This tension between forms of movement of discourse, of ideas and techniques between cultural domains, could be said to haunt Irele's work, from his earlier work in the 70s at the University of Ibadan, and more recently, as an immigrant scholar in the United States.

I speak of haunting because the issue is foregrounded, chewed over, cross-examined, but, it seems, ultimately broadcasts its protean difficulties through the lens of Irele’s work.

"The significance of [the Yoruba novelist D.O Fagunwa’s ] work is thus inherent in the symbolic framework and connotations of his novels. A simple but valid interpretation of the pattern of situation in his novels suggests that his forest stands for the universe,inhabited by obscure forces to which man stands in a dynamic moral and spiritual relationship and with which his destiny is involved;in short,a mythical representation of the existential condition of man as expressed in Yoruba thinking.

The tremendous adventure of existence in which man is engaged is dramatised by the adventures of Fagunwa's hunters who go through trials and dangers in which they must justify and affirm their human essence [exempliyimg] the hunter [as representing] the ideal of manhood in traditional Yoruba society [ demonstrated in ] ijala poetry...organised in relation to the hunter's perception of world of nature[ expressing]the particular ideal that he pursues:the unique combination of physical and spiritual energy that is the the privilege of man in the universal order,and which the traditional image of the hunter represents in the highest degree [pointing to ] cosmologies of the different African cultures [ as revealing] an intelligence of the world centred upon the privileged position of man, an imaginative and symbolic organisation of the world not simply in human terms,but in a comprehensive relation to man.

For the Yoruba,the balance of human life,the very sense of human existence,consists in the dynamic correlation of individual responsibility and the pressure of external events and forces.In the oral literature,the understanding that human life is as much a matter of chance as of conscious moral choice is what determines its social function-their illustration of the moral and spiritual attributes needed by the individual to wrest a human meaning out of his life".

These passages are a superb summation of the qualities I find compelling in Irele's writing, demonstrating the solidity of a house and the fluidity of a piece of music, evoking T.S Eliot's "... the stillness...the dancing " and W.B. Yeats "who can tell the dancer from the dance? "

Irele is very good in the concise and strikingly stimulating summation of cosmological ideas.The combination of precision and evocative power demonstrated by this particular summation makes it one of the best brief descriptions I know of an animistic cosmology,as well as one to which which nature is central.

Thematic rhythm emerges in his creation of resonance between diverse subjects as he ranges across music, literature and philosophy, seeking unifying thematics of African creativity. Cosmological rhythm is demonstrated within Irele's thematic explorations through his conjunction of Eshu, the Yoruba Orisa cosmology principle of indeterminacy and the structure and dynamism of the cosmos as understood in modern science, as speculated upon in his "The African Scholar".

Image Above A diagrammatization by Iyanifa Fayele of the Odu Ifa, the organisational categories of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge

Subsuming these instantiations of rhythm as an expressive and thematic principle in Irele's work is his lyrical translation in his essay "What is Negritude?" of Leopold Sedar Senghor on rhythm as a principle of cosmic dynamism:

"Rhythm is the architecture of being; the internal dynamic, which gives form; the system of waves which it sends out towards Others.

It expresses itself through the most material, the most sensuous means: lines, surfaces, colours, volumes in architecture, sculpture, and painting; accents in poetry and music, movements in dance.

But in doing so, it guides all this concrete reality towards the light of the spirit. ... it is in the same measure that rhythm is embodied in the senses that it illuminates the spirit."

Beautiful. Demonstrating the opaque luminosity of great religious poetry.

Luminous in evoking something sublime, gloriously exalted, yet opaque in not being exactly open to interpretation in purely ratiocinative terms, being more imaginative than intellectual and in so being, stimulating breadth of response at speculative, emotive and intellectual levels.

Elizabeth Harney in "Rhythm as the Architecture of Being: Reflections on a Black Soul", in Third Text, 24: 2, 215 — 226, also quotes an equally rich translation of those lines from Senghor.

Irele, however, seems particularly rich in his elucidation of the conceptual architecture of Senghor's Negritude, its imaginative brilliance.

Irele's expositions implicitly dramatize the force of central insights of Senghor's thought into African cosmologies though in terms of Senghor's own slant on these cosmologies.

Irele also projects the controversy inviting aspects of the Senegalese thinker's reflections. Irele's expositions, though, clarify the wealth of these ideas even in their controversial nature, as in Senghor's focus on emotion as particularly African.

Irele's demonstration of the creative complexity of even these controversial ideas suggests they are rich enough to be open to refinement, thereby arriving at possibilities taking Senghor's ideas thought beyond their limitations.

Also published on Facebook

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju‏]

                                                                              

                                                                  

     

                        “Ayajo Asuwada” 

                  Rethinking and Reworking

 Ese Ifa ,Iyami, Aje, Witchcraft Beliefs

     through Humanistic Orientations

        in Yoruba and African Thought

                                                                        

                               

                                                         

                                               

                                                              Art by Joseph Eze, used here to evoke my aspiration in developing a mystical form of witchcraft,

centred in the integration of Yoruba philosophies, Benin nature spirituality and Western magic.

                                                                                  Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                   Compcros

                                                                   Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

                                                   "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

The Necessity of Developing Critical Relationships with Ideas Relating to Spirituality

Even if we cannot prove or disprove the validity of religious ideas or ideas relating to spirituality generally we can discuss and examine them.

Discussing and examining beliefs facilitates moving from superstition to informed belief.

Image Above

Art by Jerry Kirk, used here to evoke the allure of the moon as calling to the depths of the psyche, depths invoked in modern Western witchcraft through cultivating intimate relationship with the moon.

The Dehumanization Created by Unexamined African Witchcraft Conceptions, such as the Yoruba Iyami and Aje Particularly as Constructed in Ifa Literature

Africans are paying a high price in dehumanization of supposed witches on account of unexamined beliefs in such witchcraft related ideas as Yoruba conceptions of iyami and aje.

These beliefs are partly fed in the Yoruba context by ese ifa, the literature of Ifa, the Yoruba origin oracular system described as a means of accessing the wisdom of the orisa or deity Orunmila, the Little Man With a Head Full of Wisdom, the One Who Counseled the Creator of the Universe, Olodumare, at the Time of Creation, the latter salutation coming from Wole Soyinka’s Seven Signposts of Existence, the One Who was Present at the Creation of Each Entity and is Therefore Privy to its Ultimate Possibilities, as another characterization may go.

A particular ese ifa declares all women are aje, with various ese ifa depicting aje as an essentially destructive spiritual identity.

The feminine focus of the aje personality is reinforced by their being described as ‘iya mi’, ‘my mothers’, motherhood in a sense both arcane and maternal, biological and spiritual, imbued with mysterious powers associated with both the enabling and the cutting short of life, emphasizing feeding on the very life force that motherhood enables.

Image Above

Collage of art by Joseph Eze signifying mysterious, nature centred and visionarily insightful embodiment of feminine power and beauty.

The Triangulation Created by Ife, Gelede and Ogboni as Central Yoruba Institutions in Characterizing Female Spiritual Identity

Hence, these personalities are placated by and celebrated in the Gelede society, which emphases their numinous powers, invoking their destructive capacities, urging them to direct such transformative possibilities for human good.

Gelede, Ifa and Ogboni constitute the nexus of constructions of Yoruba conceptions of the feminine in its spiritual significance, with Ogboni being the most creatively sensitive towards female power while Ifa and Gelede blend both the empowering and the denigrative or problematic in attitudes towards women.

Majestic, awesomely beautiful Gelede mask

Searching for Ultimate Truth with Limited Faculties in Spiritual Systems

How do we distinguish between success in the effort to access divine intelligence and the influence of the limitations of the human mind making the effort to reach such intelligence using instruments framed by human culture?

Various religious texts make claims which later generations have come to rightly understand as primitive and unbecoming of the religions' claims of speaking the mind of God.

Such primitive declarations supposedly from God are that of the Biblical description of God urging the Hebrews to commit genocide and awarding them land belonging to others.

Militant Islam, today's greatest global security threat, is based on narrow interpretations of the Koran.

To what degree is Ifa the mind of Olodumare, the creator of the universe, an infinite intelligence described as all knowing?

Can the existence of such an intelligence be taken as granted in the first place?

To what degree should such such claims of faith be seen as valid and in what contexts?

To what degree can ese ifa, Ifa literature, be seen as the mind of Olodumare?

The Dangers of Uncritical Assimilation of Ese Ifa, Ifa Literature, as the Speech of Olodumare, the Creator of the Universe

Is it not the same ese ifa that declares that all women are aje, recurrently depicting aje as a particularly malevolent group of spiritual creatures, irrationally destructive characters who delight in feasting on human entrails, and devastating human beings?

If we insist on taking ese ifa as gospel, would we not be compelled to accede to such dehumanising attitudes, such crass misogyny?

Are Spiritualities Not Essentially Human Constructs, the Outcome of Human Choices in Relating with the Universe?

Is it not more realistic to see religion as essentially made by humanity for humanity instead of an external compulsion, even inspiring anti-human orientations?

A Yoruba expression goes 'eniyan o si, orisa o si', translated by Adeleke Adeeko as 'no human beings, no orisa' and by Wole Soyinka as 'without the knowing of divinity by man, can deity survive?'

A Kalabari expression discussed by Nimi Wariboko, goes ' if the deity becomes too stubborn, we shall show it the wood it was carved from', leading to the Kalabari describing themselves as being able to create, appropriate or disown deities.

Among the various orientations in classical African philosophies and spiritualities, should such human centred, such humanistic perspectives, not be balanced against the more supernaturalistic directions which emphasize spirit as external to or over and above humanity?

Are the ese ifa, like all religious texts, not composed by human beings like you and I and colored by our limitations, insights and agendas?

Adeleke Adeeko, responding to the discussion on Yusuf Adetola Kareem’s Facebook wall that inspired these summation, states, “Ifá divination apparatus is far more self-questioning than contemporary practice admits. Look, Ọ̀rúnmìlà disobeyed counsel in many ẹsẹ ifá stories. And he thrived nonetheless. At any rate, ‘’bí òní ti rí, ọ̀la lè má rìí bẹ́ẹ̀, ìyẹn ni babaláwo fi ńdá'fá ọrọrún (because tomorrow may turn out differently from today, the babaláwo conducts ifá divination every fifth day).”

Image Above

I met them in the dimension between mind and forest, we spoke in a language without words.

Art by Tamara Natalie Madden.

Humanistic Orientations in Yoruba Philosophy and Orisa Spirituality

Ase

Ase, a pervasive creative force, imbuing each existent with a distinctive creative potential, is described as a unifying reality in Yoruba thought, an idea resonating across African and non-African spiritualties and philosophies.

Our Journey by Obiora Udechukwu

Ori

Ori, the totality of human intelligence as embodying both the terrestrial and the pre and post-terrestrial existence of the human being, the core of human sensitivity to the material and spiritual worlds, a nexus between time, space and infinity embodying the individual's ultimate potential, is described in Yoruba thought as the core of each entity, ‘essence and quintessence’ as described by Olabiyi Babalola Yai, the only one who can follow its devotee on a distant journey without turning back, as one ese ifa, ‘The Importance of Ori’ puts it, the one without whose blessing no orisa can bless one, as another traditional characterization goes, the one who embodies all deities as aspects of the self as Awo Falokun Fatumnbi puts it.

Art by Tamara Natalie Madden

Constructing New Iyami and Aje Spiritualities

A focus on such humanistic conceptions of the individual in relation to the cosmos, the human person as the nexus of reality as accessible to humanity, a link between matter and spirit, the central steerer of the journey across realities that is life, as empowered by cosmic force in its individualising endowments, is an approach to Yoruba and Orisa philosophies and spiritualities that can help us jettison the limitations of older ideas in these systems of thought, ideas such as the misogynies within the aje and iyami conceptions, realizing them as constructs of narrow minded people, remaking them to reflect human dignity and female empowerment, building on these to help move humanity forward by bringing to the table another rich constellation of ideas relating to the feminine and its dialectical relationship, its rhythm, with the masculine.

We need to construct, deliberately build Iyami and Aje spirituality as the West has reclaimed witchcraft as a humane spirituality, thus transforming the former dehumanizations of women represented by older conceptions of witchcraft in Western culture.

Representation of Onile, Owner of Earth and of Ogboni Sacred Space of Gathering

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju‏]

                                                                              

                                                                  

       

                                                          The Adeyinka Bello Cosmos

                                                                                                and 

       Human and Cosmic Unity in Indian Yantra Aesthetics

                                                                                    Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                   Compcros

                                                                   Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

                                                   "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

Classical Indian aesthetics uses the geometric form known as the yantra in defining balance in the human being, balance understood as demonstrated in terms of the physical and cognitive aspects of the human person.

These physical and cognitive aspects of the human being are described as constituting a unity. This unity is understood as demonstrating the unity of the cosmos.

The human being, therefore, is a unity within themselves, an intrinsic cosmos, but is also a demonstration of the unity of the totality that is the cosmos.

At each point of their being, the human person demonstrates a point of convergence with an aspect of the cosmos, an aspect, that, paradoxically, contains within itself the totality.

A metaphor helpful here is that of the Net of Indra, spread throughout the cosmos, at each joint of the net a jewel, which itself reflects every other jewel in the cosmic scope of the net.

In a similar sense, each point of the human person is a vertex, a point of convergence of the human cosmos-the microcosmos-and the larger cosmos-the macrocosmos.

This understanding of human and cosmic being is summed up in the geometric form known as the Sri Yantra.

An appreciation of the harmony of the Sri Yantra, and in terms of its relationship to the harmony that is the human being, in relation to cosmic harmony,may be appreciated through the conjoining of the image of the geometric symbol and an image of the Nigerian scholar, activist and politician, Adeyinka Bello.

This particular rendition of the Sri Yantra is chosen for its choice of and uniformity of a few bright colours in balance with each other.

The colour scheme complements superbly the structural sublimity of the yantra and works most admirably with the Adeyinka Bello image.

The colour pattern of the yantra amplifies the evocative powers of the Adeyinka Bello image, as the sheer burst of joy that is the picture of the human being laughing is further projected through the radiance of colour that is the yantra, as bright orange enters into play with sharp purple, the delicate petals within the yantra framing the human being in a manner gloriously celebratory.

The central power of this collage is in the structural coherence its two constitutive images achieve in relation to each other, a spatial unity centred in the positioning on the bindu or dot at the centre of the Sri Yantra at the mid point of the collage, unifying the human figure and the geometric form.

This visual centre, unifying geometric form and human image, evokes the symbolism of the bindu, the dot at the centre of the yantra.

The bindu evokes the metaphysical centre of existence, a zone of possibility beyond time and space, where the polarities that constitute the dynamic equilibrium of the cosmos, as dramatised by the progression of intersecting upward and downward facing triangles that compose the interior of the yantra between the lotus petals and the bindu, are integrated and transcended.

The collage therefore evokes, in a manner more explicit than the abstraction represented by the yantra or the concrete form demonstrated by the image of the human form, even in relation to verbal description of what they represent within this metaphysical scheme, the structural perfection dramatising a unity between self and cosmos that this ideational vision attributes to the human being and the cosmos as co-inherent forms.

Beyond this fundamental achievement of correlation of visual forms in a manner that suggests ideas related to each of these forms, but doing this in a manner more explicit than could be achieved by reference to either of the forms on their own, the collage evokes a further range of qualities in terms of which this metaphysical understanding perceives the human self and the cosmos.

A central quality actualised by the collage is the amplification of the sense of joy projected by Adeyinka Bello's unqualified laughter, focused in the brilliant white of teeth open in joy, their radiance foregrounded by the tender red of lips evoking the rain freshened glory of ripe apples, her neck pulsing with urgent life, a palpitating life force evoked by the strategic position of the crimson necklace at the juncture of the delicate pillar of neck and robustness of body.

The balance of colours, flashing white teeth, light red necklace and earrings, harmonising with deep red coloured lips, this balance of colours rests on the absolute vitality represented by her brown skin, projecting a visual force that radiates outward through the delicate beauty of framing by the lotus petals of the yantra, the concentric circles on which the petals rest, and finally,the lines constituting the square of four gateways that frames the entire tableau.

What this burst of joy within a cosmic matrix suggests to me is the invocation from another school of thought in a different culture from the Sri Yantra, the anonymously written Office of the Holy Tree of Life of the Hermetic Kabbalah:

"Since we were created with a shout of joy, let spiritual happiness and holiness be truly one".

Contemplating such evocations of cosmic unity as the geometric cosmograms known as yantras, of which the Sri Yantra is an example, can inspire an intense sense of bliss. Such bliss is the sheer pleasure of knowing.

This knowing may emerge in relation to an awareness of the cosmic unity the geometric form dramatises.

As this awareness achieves coalescence within the mind, under the stimulation of the yantra, a stream of pure, intense pleasure may arise with it, as I have had the privilege of experiencing.

This bliss may be seen as the nectar of existence, the life blood, the vitality of the cosmos, expressed variously in Indian thought, one form being as satchitanada, the unity of being experienced as consciousness vivified by bliss.

This sense of the vitality of life force expressed as profound pleasure, a relationship between the deepest fulfillment and cosmic being, is also suggested by Jayaratha's quoting of a source in his commentary on Abhinavagupta's Tantraloka Ch. 8, verse 2.

The expression depicts, in terms of the universe, the abstraction that is consciousness as the limpid flow of juice, concrete yet dynamic, evocative of the pleasure of a drink going down the gullet, :

"(I) salute the universe, which is Bhairava's visible body, the condensation of the flood of the juice (rasa) of consciousness that has assumed a defined form".

The cosmic totality is thereby depicted as alive with sentience, purpose and personality, being the body of Bhairava, the condensation of the juice of consciousness as it emanates from Him.

The sense of the creative power of joy is expressed with graphic force through Adeyinka Bello's radiant teeth, mouth open in laughter, her entire form projecting a life enhancing presence, her laughter resonating with even greater profundity within a timeless stillness, in the transfixed moment represented by the photograph.

That laughter, so strategically evoked in the conjoined image, is the creative force of the cosmos, the primal nexus that is as the creator exploding into being in a paroxysm of joy, delight at the stupendous idea that is the cosmos exploding from her as the life force animating the cosmos, manifesting as the white hot heat of exploding matter at cosmic genesis and the vibration of life within being, expressed inimitably within the spark in each human eye.

In travelling inward visually from the exterior of the image to its interior, from the square enclosure to the bindu at its centre, we perform the visual correlate of centripetal motion in terms of cosmic structure, moving from the cosmic circumference in metaphysical terms represented by its material form symbolised by the enclosing square, to the metaphysical centre of the cosmos beyond space and time, represented by the bindu.

In moving outward visually from the bindu to the successive forms that emerge as we approach the outermost form represented by the square enclosure, we perform a centrifugal motion, taking us from the cosmic centre, beyond space and time, a centre represented by the bindu, to the cosmic circumference in time and space, in metaphysical terms, represented by the square enclosure.

In performing this complementary inward and outward motion through the yantra within the context of the image of Adeyinka Bello in laughter within the cosmological form that is the yantra, we also navigate the human being as embodiment of cosmic unity symbolised by the yantra.

We navigate the human being as a materially realized entity whose totality encapsulates the entire schema of correlative aspects of being represented by the various forms that compose the yantra, from the material universe represented by the square enclosure to the timeless, dimensionless centre symbolised by the bindu, and corresponding to the metaphysical roots of human being within that ultimate ground.

Within this metaphysical scheme, we would thus have travelled, in these visual motions, from the spine of the human being, where resides coiled at rest, the serpent fire, the kundalini, the flame of existence coiled like a snake at the base of the spine, a point in the human body representing the material universe, the material universe symbolised by the square enclosure of the Sri Yantra.

When stimulated, the kundalini is described as rising upwards through the various centres in the spine corresponding to various zones of the cosmos.

Each of these centres on the spine and their cosmic correlates is symbolised by one of the constitutive forms of the Sri Yantra, the unity between human form and cosmic being represented by the visual conjunctions of the various forms that compose the yantra.

The upward journey of the kundalini culminates at the top of the head, the point of conjunction between the human being as an embodied entity and the timeless, dimensionless source of being, represented by the bindu of the Sri Yantra.

The climax of the journey of Kundalini is described as a consummation of opposites understood as the union of the deities the male Siva and the female Sakti, the dynamic polarities whose interaction constitutes existence.

This consummation of opposites may be seen as ultimately transcended as the journey moves through the unity of polarities to a zone beyond even conceptualisation, suggested by the circle that is the bindu.

This inward and outward progression in the yantra, evoking motion from the base of the spine to the top of the head, is also suggestive of cosmic involution, a withdrawal of the cosmos into its source at the end of a cosmic cycle, using a term for this process from the painter and Afa thinker Nyornuwofia Agosor in relation to a similar concept of cosmic development in terms of Ghanian Afa cosmology in her Cosmos Series of paintings, to remerge at the beginning of another cycle, in terms of cosmic evolution, suggested by a movement from the top of the head to the base of the spine, from cosmic centre in a dimensionless, timeless zone, to the re-emergence of the cosmos in terms of complementary polarities, ultimately grounded in the material universe of space and time.

The collage integrating the picture of Adeyinka Bello and the geometric form that is the Sri Yantra therefore evokes the possibility of visual and contemplative centripetal and centrifugal motion. It evokes the possibility of visual motion towards or outwards from a centre. This motion is developed in relation to the human image and geometric cosmic form.

This conjunction of human image and geometric cosmic symbol suggests the understanding of to the human being as co-inherent with the form of the cosmos.

The human being, like the Sri Yantra, is also seen as cosmic form, a distinctive manifestation of the totality that is itself as part of that totality.

The human being is the Sri Yantra because every part of the Sri Yantra corresponds to an aspect of the human being.

The human being is the cosmos because every aspect of the human being corresponds to an aspect of the cosmos.

The Sri Yantra is the cosmos because every aspect of the cosmos is expressed by an aspect of the Sri Yantra.

The human being and the Sri Yantra are therefore varying but ultimately unified manifestations of the same phenomenon, the cosmos.

To navigate the human being is to navigate the cosmos.To navigate the Sri Yantra is to navigate the cosmos. To navigate the human being is to navigate the equivalence of the Sri Yantra.

To navigate the Sri Yantra is to navigate the equivalence of the human being. To navigate the cosmos is to navigate its correspondence with the human being who is a manifestation of the cosmos.

To navigate the cosmos is to navigate the Sri Yantra, which is a form of the cosmos. Navigating the Sri Yantra inward and outward is to simulate the process of cosmic involution and evolution.

This inward and outward evolution also simulates an expansion of understanding of the cosmos inn terms of the derivation of all possibilities from its core and interpretation of all possibilities in relation to its core.

This imaginative possibility is expressed, in another context, in terms of an experience of cosmic evolution and involution by the Indian adept Abhinavagupta, in the concluding verses of chapter 3 of his Tantrāloka, as presented in translation by Boris Bhāskara Marjanovic in his Facebook status update of 30.10.2013:

“The entire Universe along with its great variety arises from me; then again it dissolves back into me, so that nothing separate [from consciousness] remains. Therefore, one - who because of the power [of experiencing] creation, maintenance and dissolution as one undivided act – perceives no parts but totality in one point.”

Can these conjunctions between human image and geometric form, between the images of Adeyinka Bello and the Sri Yantra, between discrete units and cosmic totality be taken further?

Is it possible, for example, to describe the detailed scheme of the categories of being or tattvas in classical Indian thought in terms of the various activities, encapsulating various aspects of life, represented by the various doings of Adeyinka Olarinmoye on her Facebook photo album?

Can one develop a visual depiction of the fundamental elements of existence in this cosmology from correlations with her images as has been done here in broad terms with one of her pictures and the Sri Yantra in relation to cosmic form?

In other words, can one take this exploration of visual and ideational conjunction further through outlining the details of the journey to and from the cosmic centre through navigating the Sri Yantra with the aid of Adeyinka Bello's pictures understood as depicting the complete scope of human existence in its broad outlines?

I suspect so.

Has one reached the level of interpretive, integrative and expressive power necessary for such an achievement?

How may one get there?

“God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and His circumference nowhere”.

May each image of Adeyinka Bello's not be both centre and circumference, a complex of associations reaching from the image beyond itself and back again?

Is each image not thus an odu ifa, a nexus of possibilities that defines the essential character of a possibility of being, adapting babalawo-adept in the esoteric knowledge of Ifa- Joseph Ohomina's description the odu ifa, organising categories and active agents of the Yoruba Ifa system of knowledge, and, in my view, by extension the entire pan and Diaspora African and increasingly global body of disciplines of which Ifa is a variant, from Fa to Efa - as the essential identities, the names of all possibilities of existence, abstract and concrete, actual and potential?

Also published on Facebook.

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju‏]

                                                                              

  

                                                                   

      

                          Human Spiritual Aspirations and Human Limitations

                                                                        

                                                                                    

                         

                                               

Michael Sovran's picture of Everest

the world's highest mountain, on Flickr.

Mountains are often used in symbolizing great aspiration, particularly spiritual aspiration

                                                                                  Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                   Compcros

                                                                   Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

                                                   "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

                                                                                                                                    Abstract 

On the hunger to pursue  the farthest reaches of knowledge and human limitations in this quest.

Spirituality as Action in the Dark

Spirituality is often equivalent to moving about in the dark.

It is often speculative, an effort to project the mind into regions it does not know how to enter, thus uncritical imaginative creation takes control.

Spirituality may be described as the effort of a partially sighted person to explore a world they can hardly see.

It is also akin to moving about in a deeply unfamiliar landscape, significantly different from the human spatio-temporal cosmos.

How does one interpret what one sees, hears or feels there and present whatever is understood?

It is also akin to a landscape glimpsed briefly through flashes of lightning, to adapt S.T. Coleridge on watching the actor Edmund Keane play Shakespeare and Susanne Wenger on Yoruba Orisa ritual in Ulli Beier's The Return of the Gods.

How does understand and represent these glimpses?

Speculation, uncritical imagination, exaggeration, often run riot.

                                                                                                                                       

                                   

 

                                                                                                                 Image Above

Symbols of aspiration, particularly spiritual aspiration, a collage by myself of Nicholas Roerich's ''Wanderer from the Resplendent City'' from Pinterest and Michael Sovran's picture of Everest, the world's highest mountain, on Flickr.

 

Images of Aspiration and Limitation in the Spiritual and Philosophical Quest

My favorite images on this-

Thomas of Aquinas, one of the greatest of Western theologians and philosophers, is saying Mass, an effort at unifying spirit and matter through symbolic action, at which point he has a vision of the reality beyond this world, the universe as it is as different from how it is described, a vision that makes his immense library of writings look like grass in comparison, after which vision he stops writing, leaving his magnificent Summa Theologica unfinished, as the story goes.

''I do not know how I may seem to others, but to myself, I am as a child playing on the sea shore and finding pebbles, some brighter than others, while the great ocean of truth lies undiscovered before me''- Isaac Newton, one of the greatest thinkers in history.

The distance between cosmic reality and human perception is like a decrepit old man, wandering about dressed in lice infested rags, who is yet a ray of light from the hearth of Gueno, creator of the universe.

The rags and the lice infested clothes are akin to our awareness of reality.

Who will be attentive enough to the potential beyond the exterior to look within and perceive the glorious interior?

-my interpretation of the image of Kaidara as described by Ahmadou Hampate Ba in various essays and particularly in his Kaidara: A Fulani Cosmological Epic from Mali.

Augustine of Hippo, foundational theologian and thinker in the Western Christian and philosophical tradition, was one day at the sea shore, at which point he saw a child repeatedly filling with water from the sea a hole he had dug in the sand.

''What are you doing,'' he asked the child. ''Trying to empty the ocean into the hole,'' the little one responded.

''That is impossible,'' he told the child.

''Just like it's impossible for you to understand the Trinity with your mind,'' the child responded.

Augustine understood the message being conveyed by the mysterious messenger, as the story goes. De Trinitate, On the Trinity, is however, regarded as one of Augustine's greatest works, its discussion of the Christian concept of the triune yet unified identity of God in relation to the human mind being enduringly insightful across theology and philosophy.

In order to occupy himself while in prison, an Aztec priest imprisoned by the Spanish invaders of South America spends his time watching a tiger in a cage near his cell, and reflecting on the belief that the creator of the universe had achieved this cosmic feat by using a word, a word he then confined to an aspect of creation, so it would survive in the material realm, subsisting within the vicissitudes of history.

One day, watching the tiger, he sees that word as emerging into his awareness through the composition of the patterns on the skin of the tiger, the tiger being a totem of the ultimate creator.

Access to the awesome power of this word implies he can reconstruct reality, obliterate the prison he is locked in, flush away the Spanish conquerors and rule mightier than the greatest kings.

''But, having seen the fiery designs of the universe, the wheel of being and becoming across time and infinity, what is the significance of the fate of one man?'' he asks himself. ''Thus I lie here and let the days obliterate me'' as Jorge Lois Borges' story, ''The God's Script'' concludes.

A tiger paces a cage, frustrated by his desire to do things he has never done nor seen done. Having been bred in captivity, he does not realize his dissatisfaction with the food he is fed by his keepers is because he desires to race across the savanna in hunt of prey and tear into hot flesh, as his wild nature hungers for. Yet he has to remain locked in that tightly confined space, daily gaped at by his two legged spectators.

One day the tiger has a dream, in which God explains to the tiger the reason for his predicament. '' You are held captive'' the divine one states, ''so that a certain man will see you a certain number of times, and be thereby inspired to place your image in a word of a poem that has a precise place in the structure of the universe. You suffer, but you would have contributed a word to that poem.

The tiger accepts his fate but on waking he forgets the dream, because the designs of the universe are too complex for the mind of a tiger.

Dante, in exile in Ravenna, reflects on the bitterness of his life, driven away by a coup from his native Florence.

One night, God appears to him in a dream, revealing to him the logic of his tortuous life.

He accepts his fate, understanding its significance in the dynamism of being, but, on waking, he forgets the dream, because the design of the universe is too complex for the mind of a human being, yet, Dante's composition of an attempt to dramatize the nature of the universe through the words of his Divine Comedy remains one of the greatest achievements of humanity in the centuries since it was written, the chapter in that poem with the image of the tiger being the title of the story,''Inferno, 1, 32'' told by Borges I have tried to relate here.

A rabbit farmer from time to time takes away one of the rabbits for his supper.

The rabbits, in the security they have developed on account of the long stretches between the disappearances of one of them, are puzzled as to this negative pattern in their lives, since they never see the farmer or any human being and have and have no idea of any mode of existence beyond that of the space where they live.

There arise among them poets and philosophers who create imaginative and intellectual constructs to help them adapt to this painful reality about which they can do nothing, so runs Richard Adams' metaphorical exploration in Watership Down of the human effort to adjust itself to the reality of death, an effort central to the arts, philosophy and spirituality in trying to make meaning of a puzzling universe.

We exist on a small island represented by what we know. Our understanding is akin to crude echoes from an infinite intelligence- Catholic theologian Karl Rahner and physicist Albert Einstein.

''You can measure the height of a wall, but can you do this in an absolute sense? Can you measure the height of a wall from the perspective of an ant, for example?'', asks the mathematician Ramanujan.

The ant was asked, ''What is God to you? A big ant,'' of course, the ant responded.

''What do you understand of the essence of my teaching?'', the Buddha asks his disciples after many years of teaching.

Each of the disciples responds with rich verbal explanations, representing their understanding of the complexity and depth of the teaching, and to each of them, he responds ''to you I give my my bowl , my cloak, my skin, my bones,'' etc, moving progressively from the symbolic relationship of each of his possessions, meagre but vital to sustaining his life even in his ascetic lifestyle, to his clothes, vital for warmth and social decency, to his body, represented by his skin and even more intimately, his bones, thereby suggesting the level of penetration of each of the answers to the heart of his teaching.

The last disciple to respond, however, says nothing.

He bows, but remains ''thunderously silent'' as this story is put in Paul Reps collection of Buddhist stories, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.

The Buddha responds, ''to you, I give my marrow.''

Representations of this silent disciple run in Buddhist art across the centuries, Reps states, recognizing a central vision of a strand of various philosophies and spiritualities, which may be summed up in the question-having had your eyes opened to see in a world of blind people, how can you describe what you see to your still blind fellows?

Having experienced something beyond words, beyond thought, beyond images and senses, how do you describe it?

No one, no matter how wise, can hold water in the folds of their pocket, a line from the Yoruba origin Ifa literature states, as quoted in Wande Abimbola's Ifa Divination Poetry.

thus summing up my view for epistemic humility, critical scepticism, in dealing with spirituality.

The Human Race as Epistemic Children

The human race, in my view, is best understood, not as fools, but as children, people whose cognitive capacities are not sufficiently mature to adequately grasp what their nature compels them to explore, the cosmos in its totality, physical and non-physical, material and spiritual, physical and metaphysical.

 

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju‏]

  

                                                                   

      

                                 A Course of Study in the Earth Veneration of the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality

                                                                                                               

                                                             

                                                            Ilè, Earth as mother of all,  wild and beautiful, naked in openness to all,

                                                                      inspiring  nakedness of spirit in veneration and emulation.

                                                         Great mother, we salute you in this journey beneath and among the stars.

                                                                                      Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                       Compcros

                                                                    Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems 

                                                     "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

Goal

The goal of the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality is the development of an intimate relationship with Ile, Earth, the mother of all in this world and the meeting point of all that exists.

This relationship leads to fulfilment because it links one more securely with what makes existence on Earth possible, the mother on whose body we walk, whose air we breathe, whose water we drink, her space the zone where the light of the sun reaches us, the fire she enables our primary source of energy, her body receiving our body when we leave the Earth, yet remaining in touch with those we have left behind.

This is she known in Ògbóni as Onile, Owner of Earth and of Ògbóni Sacred Space of Community, known among other devotees in Yoruba origin Orisa spirituality as Ìyá Nlá, Great Venerable Female.

Ways of Relating with Ilè, Earth

How may one relate with Earth and how may this relationship advance one's well being?

She may be related with through devotion, in the expression of love for her.

She may be identified with through action, in  how one lives one's daily life, emulating her motherly love in sustaining everything and everyone, and through adaptation to the destructive aspects of life because she also maintains existence through destruction, as the Earth also destroys through natural disasters.

One may come closer to her  through knowledge, by studying and sharing knowledge of her and what she represents, for all material existence and its unity with spirit represents her.

She may be made more fully part of one's life through care for one's body and mind and those of others, because our bodies are part of her and our minds are made possible in the material world by our bodies.

                                                                                                                        

                                                                       

             Edan Ògbóni, male and female humans as children and embodiments of she who unites us by making our existence here possible,

 

                                                                                                O Mighty Mother.

Outcomes of Relationship with Earth, Universal Mother

Calling on Earth can facilitate swift resolution of challenges, enabling of good fortune, sparking inspiration for creative pursuits and protection in danger.

Course Structure, Facilities, Certificate of Completion and Sharing of Course Learning

The course of study in the Universal Ògbóni Philosophy and Spirituality will present in detail how all these goals are to be pursued.

The course will be presented in terms of four lessons a week and a total of eight in a month covering these subjects.

These lessons will be delivered in terms of etexts containing both theory and practice.

A Whatsapp group will function as a space for discussing the ideas and practices of the course as well personal issues, questions and experiences of those who register for the course.

A certificate of completion will be provided on completing the course.

Those who register for the course are encouraged to discuss what they learn with people outside the group.

Those who take part in the course, whenever they are ready, may feel free to start their own courses using materials they have constructed, possibly inspired by the course and containing some of its contents, and seek collaboration with me or ideas from me.

Proliferation is a demonstration of influence.

Course Fees and Modes of Payment

The course costs the equivalent of 30,000 naira for all participants resident in Nigeria.

It costs $100 for all participants resident outside Nigeria, which comes to about the same rate when converted into Nigeria naira.

The money can be paid in four instalments..

Contact Details

To register interest and get payment instructions, you may contact me by email at toyin....@gmail.com, by phone or WhatsApp at 002348051439554 and on Facebook Messenger.

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